Fall Leaves Are The Best Mulch
Looking for a great mulch for your garden? Just look up, it’s probably falling out of the sky right now!
“Use whatever you can find that is close by and free”. This is the common mantra of most heavy mulch gardeners when they are asked what mulch to use - and I am sure that I have said this myself on more than one occasion. It is good advice, because any mulch is better than no mulch, and mulches that are free and close by are the ones that people are more likely to use. It is also the case that most heavy mulch gardeners care deeply for the environment, so the last thing they want is people driving long distances to get mulch; or sourcing exotic mulches from the four corners of the earth and having them delivered, thereby attaching an obscene ecological footprint to their gardening inputs.
So why does the title of this article say that fall leaves are the best? Well, because one of them has to be the best… right?
Now before I go into my argument in favor of fall leaves, let me first expand on what I mean when I use the word “BEST” in the context of this article. “BEST” can mean many things, and since a mulch does many things, then it follows that an argument for what is the BEST mulch must be built around all those things. So with no further ado, here is a rundown of how leaves perform according to eleven traits that are desired of a good mulch:
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