We all know cedar chests repel moths and cedar shavings are routinely used in homes to control insect pests. Based on this, gardeners have concluded that cedar mulch will repel insects in the garden and will negatively impact pollinators trying to get to flowers. For these reasons they recommend you should not use cedar mulch.
Is there any science to support these claims? Does it harm bees? Does it affect ants and termites?
Should you stop using cedar mulch?
The use of wood chips for mulch is very popular but there are also many myths about it. Will it rob nitrogen from the soil? Is the dye on black mulch toxic? Do wood chips attract termites and can it ignite spontaneously?
These are just some of the myths I’ll investigate in this post.
Fall leaves are a great resource of nutrients for the garden but if you use them incorrectly, they can rob your soil of nitrogen and make it difficult for plants to grow. This is especially true in a vegetable garden where you are trying to grow things quickly from seed.
In this post I discuss the decomposition of fall leaves and explain how to properly use them in the garden. In the process you might discover some interesting things about your compost pile.
Mulching the garden is a very common recommendation. Mulch will reduce the number of weeds and it will hold moisture in the soil but how does mulch affect the quality of soil?
There are lots of claims that mulch improves soil but have you ever seen numbers to validate them? I haven’t either. How exactly does mulch improve soil? It should add organic matter, but how much? It should increase the number of microbes, but is this really true? Unfortunately, almost nobody studies landscapes and gardens because no one will fund the work.
Luckily I was able to find one very good research paper that looked at this exact problem.
This post, Fungi in Wood Chips, was prompted by a picture and discussion on a Facebook group called Australian Native Plant Enthusiasts (ref #3). The discussion was about the harmful fungi that appeared in wood chip mulch used in children’s playgrounds. Off course they posed no real danger–but people were scared. There are a lot of misconceptions about fungi growing in the garden and this post will look at the truth about fungi in wood chips.
