How to mulch your beds and borders

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Overview

Carol Klein demonstrates how to add mulch to beds and borders to enrich the soil and ensure healthy plants.

Do it: spring and autumn

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Talkback: How to mulch your beds and borders

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Pearse Carty 21/10/2012 at 15:27

As perennials are cut down to the ground in Autumn when they die back what is the best way to apply mulch please? Do you, for example, cover the crown as well as the area around where the roots are underground, and is this with about 5 to 8cms of the mulch? If so, do you need to remember to pull back that mulch cover in Spring to allow in light to the centre to allow leaf growth?...or will the mulch roof have gradually eased its way back into the soil? If not, will the plant simply grow up through it? If so, what will the bed look like after, say 6 winters???!!! TY,P.

sotongeoff 22/10/2012 at 12:14

If you apply a mulch to the borders it is best around plants- but even if you cover the crown I have found the new shoots tend to grow through anyway

Not sure what you mean by six years?

Pearse Carty 28/10/2012 at 09:24

Thank you for that. Much appreciated. By 6 winters I was jokingly trying to imagine a border a number of feet above normal ground/lawn level if you put mulch upon layer of mulch winter after winter!....with the perennialls getting deeper into the soil.

Zoomer44 28/10/2012 at 18:10

There was a discussion not long ago about putting on layer after layer each year of mulch, compost, manure etc...and as no one had a bed which reached the height of their house yet the conclusion was it rots down have some trust