Garden Mulching Needed. Thanks to Nancy Marsden and all who attended the gardening meeting at Zeste’s on Saturday! I got home and found a reason to add some comments. In one word: mulch.

Towards the end of the meeting we asked Mr. Zeste why his native plants looked so beautiful. His answer was “16 yards of mulch and compost.” I’m trying to think where he got it but it was from a certified organic company up in Harlingen, who mainly uses chipped cedar (really mountain juniper) from the Austin-San Antonio Hill County. It is good stuff. It seemed like a load was maybe $250-$300 per load, if my memory serves right.

The picture at the top of this article is from the Brownsville landfill, which has quite a mature mulch recycling program. I have not sampled their wares but it seems like it should be just fine, perhaps more a mixture of palm fronds and stuff like that. It is difficult to translate the dollars per ton into a truckload, although it should be cheaper because of less trucking, one might surmise.

Bayview Farms and some other outlets have cypress chips, possible the best mulch but very expensive by comparison, like slightly over $20 per very large 40# bag. It is great stuff but when you get into needing 10-20 bags, can add up in price quite quickly.

I do not recommend using expensive mulches for the dune system, but for anything else I think we need truckloads of the stuff to really get any longevity out of our native planting projects. I did visit the “butterfly garden” down by Venus Street and it was a disaster, since no mulch was used. Given that the sandy clay down here has almost zero carbon content, it is imperative to use mulches and compost along with some kind of watering program (BTW, I did NOT see an irrigation system down there, and half the stuff really was dead as a doornail!).

I will be glad to split a load with somebody, since 5 yards of mulch and compost goes a lot faster then you would think, at 3-4 inches deep for all garden areas. As for the urban garden projects, I think we should have some fund-raisers for getting some of these $200 loads out to the Island, as pickup trucks just won’t cut it. Count me in for some help if you want it.