Mulch

Marijuana Horticulture

by Jorge Cervantes

Mulch attract and retains soil moisture and smothers weeds. Mulch is a layer of decomposing foliage, straw, grass clippings, weeds, etc. and/or paper, rocks, plastic, etc, laid around plants.

native foliage is an excellent and convenient mulch. My favorite mulch is dry grass clippings, which are free. Fill your backpack with grass clippings before every trip to the patch. Always pile the much as high as you can because it biodegrades over time.

Rock or rock dust makes excellent mulch. Use rock mulches where they are readily available. They become hot to touch on sunny days, but they still protect the soil from evaporative moisture loss.

Newspaper or brown paper shopping bags make excellent mulch. Slightly wet paper is easier to work with and less likely to blow around. Inexpensive and readily available, newspaper layers should be at least six pages thick, before adding a soil or mulch covering to hold it in place.

Woven weed barriers or strips of scrap carpet let water drain but will not let the weed grow through. Cover these barriers with rock or bark chips.

Cover the entire garden bed with black plastic and cut holes thru which seedlings are planted. A soaker hose can be laid underneath the plastic to irrigate,. Make sure to cut large enough holes so that plant stems do not touch the plastic. Black plastic gets very hot during the day but actually warms the soil very little. When a young, tender plant stem touches the hot, black plastic, it will literally cook the soil line.