What is the BEST mulch for your garden? (Avoid the one that KILLS EVERYTHING)

welcome back today we're going to talk about which mulch is best for your garden and mulch that you want to avoid because it will absolutely destroy your garden [Music] I'm sitting here in a new area of grocery Gardens that we build if you notice right here we have some wood chip mulch and right here we have some grass mulch I gave a couple of talks this last weekend at the keepers of the old ways over in Dothan Alabama and a woman there said now I'm confused because you're talking about wood chips being great for perennials but liking to use grass in your garden and now I've got wood chips in my garden and I I don't think that that was the best idea should I pull the wood chips out of my garden and replace them with grass no today we're going to talk about a few different mulching options and we're going to try and keep it as cheap and easy as possible and I'm going to kind of give you an overview of different mulches and where you might want to use them and then we're going to talk about obviously what the best one is and and it's going to be like one of those trick things where you get to the end you're like oh come on oh why did I watch this whole video just to hear that David Glenn is a fraud and I don't like his brand I don't like the the hat and the bare feet I don't like The Branding on this channel it's dumb I'm not gonna do this video anymore almost everybody has this mulch available grass clippings do you have a yard why do you have a yard you should have a food Forest it's useful to have a yard because you have to have some place to graze your goats or to graze your lawnmower so if you have a lawnmower and you can bag up grass clippings grass clippings are fantastic right one of the reasons why grass clippings are super good for the garden is that they decompose rapidly now if you were gonna do a border of azaleas or something like that it's like you don't want something that decomposes rapidly so you might use pine bark chips or eucalyptus mulch or something like that but in a vegetable garden the grass clippings are kind of like a slow release fertilizer I love grass clippings they can tend to mat up a little bit so you got to make sure you know if you put them on really thick they're not turning into a big mat but grass clippings are readily available they're one of the very very best mulches that you can use in a garden space and variants of this would be straw or hay straw is the leftover from grain production so straw is the mostly carbon less seeds in it usually though you often get some wheat or Rye or oats or something coming up through it the thing I don't like about straw is that it's often defoliated with glyphosate meaning that they they spray the crop in order to harvest it all at once which is just totally messed up and that means that you might be getting some of those residues through into your garden unless you have an organic Source but if you know what's going on your lawn hopefully you're not spraying it with anything I don't care if you're putting 10 10 10 on it or turf builder or something like that but if you're putting weed and feed you know with atrazine or if you have the the chemlon guys coming by and spraying that's not ideal you can manage your lawn and think of it as a reservoir of fertility and mulch to feed your garden if you manage it properly having a big patch of grass is a great thing because you've got tons and tons of mulch and I like it on my Gardens when I have enough foreign mulch option here I was talking about the long lasting stuff these are Pine shreds from a local Sawmill where they clean up these big logs and they Shred the leftovers this stuff does not feed your garden beds very well at all it takes a long time to break down so it is a good mulch for pathways or to put on the surface around trees where it's going to Decay very slowly but it'll keep the ground cool keep the moisture in it's just not the best and you definitely don't want to mix it in in a vegetable garden situation so I like this stuff for long-term paths and rather like some other slow decaying things it's it has its value think of pine needles or oak leaves those are great you can use them are they the best in your lettuce pad probably not better than nothing probably [Laughter] but they're really good for long-term cat situations but eventually they do Decay and then you can take the material that's in the pathway and dig it out and you have a layer of compost you can throw it onto your beds and turn around and remulch again with something else that lasts a long time you put grass clippings in your garden beds it rots down fast you put grass clippings in your Pathways it rots down fast and next thing you know your pathways are full of weeds and just doesn't last long enough so quick rule of thumb stops IT decays quickly goes in the bed it's gonna feed the beds stuff that decays more slowly goes in the pathway stuff that's really high in carbon definitely put it in the pathway you know so it stays longer but it's just a rule of thumb if you want to put slower decaying materials in your bed because you want to get a couple Seasons use out of it you can do that there are benefits to mulch whether or not it's a slow decaying or faster King so don't get too hung up on it just mulch with something if you're going to use mulch I don't like this really really high carbon stuff in here because it will bind up nitrogen if I mix it in and I invariably end up putting some into the planting holes and stuff if I've got a thick layer of it on top and I I just don't think it's got that much nutrition in it this grass has a lot of nutrition in it this is mostly just carbon and because it's very fresh wood chips it's got some volatile oils and stuff in there that I don't really think are going to be great for the garden bed but after it decays in here and it serves its purpose as a pathway for some period of time it'll get rotten and black underneath I could dump that stuff onto these beds and use it another excellent mulch just use the weeds and Food Forest systems in particular it makes sense to just let a whole ton of stuff grow no matter what it is you're getting biomass you're getting nutrients accumulated you're getting carbon and then you just slash it down and throw it around whatever you want to feed so say you've got an apple tree in the ground or in my case here this is a pawpaw tree you just are going to slash those weeds down and throw them so I love to see The Tall Weeds growing around the Food Forest I can get out there with a side or I can do it the little the little way with a tiny little hand sickle and I can chop and drop the weeds and make a nice little mulch bed which is going to feed the plant and provide the benefits of mulch keeping the ground moist and spongy feeding worms feeding the soil life and composting our enemies another thing you can do is to deliberately grow materials that you're going to chop and drop now you can do this as a cover crop and just make a living mulch which is really great wouldn't say you don't have a lot of grass to cut you don't have wood chips you don't have materials well go and buy some seeds and Seed an area what I've got right here is a mixture of different grains along with some winter rye grass and some Clover and some peas that I spread down this pathway and raked it in and then watered it and here it is I did that earlier in the year and now I don't have to even mulch this pathway because I've got grass in it that's alive and I can continually cut this over and over again to put around my little crops so this apple tree gets a little bit this sunflower gets a little bit this goji berry gets a little bit and I could just go down here and mow the grass or it could be real clever and get my side but it needed to be sharpened so I'm not going to show you that it's too high effort so I'm using this tiny High effort tool instead and just going by hand caveman Style so if you have a lack of mulch material remember that you can just seed the ground and grow your own one thing that we did this last year that was incredible was your groove Sun hemp Sun hemp nitrogen fixing massive amount of biomass like eight foot tall which we could chop and drop so if you've got an empty patch a bear patch a piece of lawn you're not using the edge of your garden an empty garden bed fill it totally full of something like sun hemp or sorghum Sudan grass in the summer [Music] you get tons of materials and you can often cut it again and again and again and make your own mulch because getting Chip drop to drop stuff at your house is not always easy so you might as well grow your own So speaking of Chip drop my favorite mulch for perennials in particular but also for Pathways and for garden beds if it's what I have is a mixed hardwood mulch from the power company so I was able to catch some guys who were clearing the lines because a friend of mine told me that they were doing it and I was able to get some shredded mulch that was a mix of different Hardwoods so there's Hickory in here there's Oak in here there's wild plums and Persimmons and all kinds of other stuff mixed in some Pine and it's all mixed together now what this means is that there's a wide range of plant material which means there's a wide range of nutrients and it rots down nicer than the pine does leaving a lot of Rich humans you can use this stuff for potting soil this has been two years now it was actually almost two years ago and we had the piles piled up they smoked for a while and then we used some of it in the garden beds and then a lot of it just sat and then a friend of mine when we moved helped us move it over here and we got a pile we've used almost all of it now but this material that's underneath is super rich so this is great slow release compost really really good for a food Forest it's great if you're growing trees and some people will say that you know you want to have a fungally dominated soil in a forest situation so go ahead and put down wood chips wood chips get a lot of fungus in them which is great so the idea is vegetable gardening is more bacterially dominated fast growing quick live fast Die Young like a bacteria or long-term slow Decay cool lots of mycelium strands running and creeping through and eating the lignans digesting the carbon slowly over time fungal so that's forest floor material this is great instant forest floor material in vast quantities so you can feed just about any perennial with it and when it gets to this would be great for your vegetable garden as well or you could just sift it and start seeds in it just probably have to add a little bit of nitrogen still that's an awesome mulch so if you don't want to worry about bacterially dominated fungally dominated blah blah blah blah blah just about any mulch is better than no mulch I mean don't use shredded tires you know plastic unless you absolutely have to do that to grow food I'm not going to tell you to not do something that's growing your food that's the primary thing but use the mulch you have I have a lot of grass I have a beat up zero turn mower that I got a great deal on does not have a bag so I drive it around in circles and shoot it out the side until I make a mound or I have kids do it for me half of these mountains I did half of these mountains the kids did this is the mulch you have this is the best mulch use what you have if you got pine needles use some pine needles if you got oak leaves use some oak leaves if you've got grass clippings use grass clippings The Mulch you have it's like a friend in need a friend close by is better than a brother far away use what you got but Here's the final the final thing I'm going to tell you what's really really a mulch you do not want to use because it'll destroy your garden and that is hey but wait a minute why can't I use hay Ruth Stout potato planting method hey it's fantastic now hey you're gonna think it's the seeds right hay is full of Siege you don't want to use that well these grass clippings are full of seeds but I'll use these and not hey but David's good this is just shredded hay stop leading us on you're just trying to get clicks no let me tell you what's wrong with hay a lot of hay is now produced on fields that are sprayed with long-term persistent herbicides and I'm not talking like hippie dippy stuff like there might be a little glyphosate residue and you're like well I've used it for years and it's never hurt my tomatoes no I'm not talking about that I'm not talking about stuff that gets sprayed and goes away enough to not kill your plants I'm talking about stuff that will kill all the broadleaf plants in your garden for a year two years three years I'm talking about stuff that's so nasty you can compost it and it still goes through I'm talking about stuff that's so nasty you can feed it to your cow passes through you compost the manure you put the manure on your garden and it kills your garden ask me how I know it kills your garden I've done videos on it before I write about it in compost everything the good guide to extreme composting the long-term persistent herbicides that are often sprayed on Hay become pulled up by the plant itself you put it on your garden it kills it I had a friend who grew rare Chinese herbs she had a food forest with rare medicinal herbs in it that she had collected for some years somebody told her we have a load of rotten hay you can have it she said fantastic I need mulch for all of my beautiful herbs did you spray anything on this hay nope nope just normal hay she took it home she put it on the herbs a few weeks later she notices that a lot of the tips are starting to curl is starting to get damaged all of them are starting to show damage all around the edges of it it's after a rain it's soaked into the ground the poison is still in that stuff it's really incredibly nasty and I'm not exaggerating at all how bad this is when I tell you manure will kill your garden or hay will kill your garden you know me I'm the cheapest guy in the world I will use just about anything I believe in composting everything but this stuff is a hellish manufacturer you know of just it's modern science evil just remember that it's it's horrible it is a shortcut to Growing pastures and it is used extensively and recommended extensively so if you use hay and there is any chance that it could have been sprayed don't take it now if it's hay from the old guy down the street he never sprays anything never has sprayed anything he tells you he never sprayed anything you trust him that he's never sprayed anything go ahead and get it that's a good source but a lot of sources are not we can't feed hay from the farms around here to our cows because the cow manure can't can't then be used for the garden so it's one of the super super frustrating things but you need to know it so remember these two things anything take away use the mulch that you have think creatively if you've got organic matter you can throw on top of the ground you get all those benefits of the mulch the spongy soil feeding the worms keeping the roots cool no tilling everything is being protected from the rain all that beautiful stuff right so remember just use the mulch that you have just about anything is usable unless it's poisonous plants then you might want to just dry them out and throw them in your compost pile first and then secondarily don't use hay that has any chance of having been sprayed because you could wreck your entire Garden for the year remember those two points don't get too confused use what you got if you can't be with the hay you love love the hay you have I think there was a song about that actually thanks for joining me if you want to learn more about composting everything and how to avoid toxins and to feed your garden for free check out my book compost everything the good guide to extreme composting it's cheap and once you spend that just that's the last thing you have to spend to feed your garden for free check it out I'll put a link below compost everything the good guide to extreme composting and until next time make your thumbs always be green thank you wish there's more I could do with these foreign [Music] [Music] so quick rule of thumb then slow decaying stuff in your pathways stuff that takes longer to decay in your pathways does that make sense the first mulch I'm going to talk about wow why would I say that the first mulch I'm going to talk about I don't need to talk I need you to like announce everything it's called telegraphing it don't Telegraph it first thing that I'm going to start talking about in a minute is this thing let's start talking about this thing you don't do that let's talk about grass mulch this is grass right here [Music] soon [Music]

Channel: David The Good

Views: 206,071

Keywords: gardening, composting, David The Good, back to eden, deep mulch, ruth stout, aminopyralid, herbicide, wood chips, best mulch, how to mulch, wood chip mulch, straw mulch, worst mulch, free wood chips, organic gardening, benefits of mulch, toxic mulch, herbicides in manure, herbicides in hay, sunn hemp, chop and drop, frugal gardening, garden hacks, check gardening ideas, mulch garden, grass clippings

Id: VPV2gnC6-zY

Length: 20min 9sec (1209 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 05 2023