Every day I go out and meet with people to assess their trees and provide advice on their health and safety; and I constantly find myself talking about the same things over and over, and the thing that I talk about to people the most is the benefits of mulching their trees and garden.
The reason is that mulching your trees is undoubtedly the cheapest, easiest thing you can do to promote, maintain and ensure the long term health and longevity of the trees in your garden.
The biggest benefit is that the mulch helps to retain moisture in the soil. In a rapidly changing environment with more extremes experinced in weather events we need to prepare for longer periods of below average rainfall. Mulching helps to reduce evaporation whilst also soaking up moisture and retaining it for longer periods. Other than sunlight, water is the most important thing needed by a tree to maintain necessary tree functions, such as photosynthesis, transporation and nutrient uptake. Without water these necessary functions, will alter reduce or stop all together, which in turn have a direct impact on tree health.
As well as water retention there are more great benefits that mulch brings to trees and other things in your garden. Mulch asissts with soil texture, encouraging spaces between soil particles, assists with gas exchange which is essential for roots and also to allow water to penetrate between the soil to be accessed by tree roots.
Mulch also encourages soil fauna, things like worms and grubs that help to break down organic material which in time becomes availble in the form of nutirents to be uptaken again by the tree. It also improves soil texture which the beneifts of this has been mentioned already.
One of the other great attributres of mulching your trees other than it looks and smells great is that it suppressus weeds. Weeds compete with trees for water and nutrients and are quite frankly a pain in the but, so anything that can help us reduce weed growth is a huge plus.
The benefits of mulching your trees is endless, and at the end of the day. healthy trees are more resistant to pest and disease, so heathy trees are more likely to stay healthy, it sounds funny but it is the truth.
So with all the great things that mulch does for your garden, why would you not want to think about mulching today, its cheap its easy it looks great, and the beneifts to your tree health and longterm viability is endless! SO GET MULCHING TODAY!
For more information on this and many other things that you could do at home to improve the health and safety of your trees visit www.treefx.com.au or like us on Facebook.
Our experienced and qualified arborists are here to assist you, so contact us on 1300 TREEFX or info@treefx.com.au
Dean Meyer
Cert IV in Horticulture (Arboriculture), Melbourne University.
Diploma in Arboriculture, Melbourne Polytechinic,