I Don't Use Wood Mulch in My Garden, & You Don't Have to Either

I've caused quite a stir on the interwebs whenever I've mentioned that I don't use mulch in my vegetable garden. A lot of long-time gardeners love them some mulch, and that's okay. I don't love it, and I'll tell you why.

But before I do, let me clarify first that I'm talking about vegetable gardens, not all gardens. I know some of you consider mulch in your ornamental gardens necessary, and I get it (though I don't even use mulch in my in-ground pollinator garden).

Secondly, I've tried all types of organic mulch in my garden—wood chips, wood shavings, bark chunks, grass clippings, leaf mulch, pine straw, you name it. I even put mulch in the raised-bed kitchen gardens of some of my first clients. So I have tried it and found it lacking.

Mulch for the Garden Is Not the Only Way

There are two areas in the vegetable garden where many gardeners traditionally (often religiously) add mulch: the soil surface around the vegetables and herbs growing there, and the area around the garden beds. Mulch is used heavily in both vegetable gardens and landscaping for three primary reasons:

• A thick layer of mulch suppresses weeds
• Mulch regulates temperature in the soil
• Mulch retains moisture

Mulch can certainly have these benefits, but I've found over the years that a combination of raised beds filled with great soil and regularly replenished with fresh compost offers the same benefits and more.

Weed Suppression

The height of raised beds (plus some weed barrier cloth underneath) makes it hard for weeds to grow up from under the bed, which means you'll only have to contend with a few airborne weeds now and again when you're growing in a raised garden bed.

Soil Temp Regulation

Raised beds also regulate the soil temperature. In the spring and fall, the soil in raised beds stays warmer than the soil in the ground, which allows you to extend your total growing time.

Moisture Retention

Raised beds improve drainage, and compost helps retain moisture in the soil.

I recommend using compost to retain moisture and nutrients in your raised-bed garden instead of wood chips or leaf mulch.

Let's look at the three key reasons why I don't think using wood mulch in your vegetable garden is a good idea.

Mulch Continuously Decomposes

The first reason not to use mulch is that you create a sort of tug of war between the mulch and your plants. Your garden is now a competition to see who's going to get the nitrogen. Is it going to be the plants that you want to grow or the wood chips that are trying to decompose? The reason there's this competition is because wood mulch is not finished. It's on its way to becoming soil, but it's not there yet.

In my garden, I really only want things that are, for the most part, stagnant or in the process of growing. I don't want things that are in the process of dying. Of course, soil is a living thing that's always changing, but I want the main change in my garden to be happening with my plants, not anything else.

When you bring mulch into your garden, you're introducing something that's in the process of changing. If you let mulch sit there, it will eventually turn into fine soil particles. Don't get me wrong—I love composting. I just don't want to do that in my garden. Because as wood decomposes, it pulls nitrogen from its surroundings to help it break down. But your plants need that nitrogen to help them form leaves and stems and roots.

So when you plant your garden and then spread out the mulch, you're putting two things that are changing in your garden—one coming into life and the other returning to the earth—and they both need nitrogen to do it. That's the tug of war.

Mulch vs Compost

Save all those nutrients for your precious plants by only bringing in soil elements that have already broken down, like compost.

I can already hear armchair soil scientists saying, "But when the mulch breaks down, it feeds the soil microbes!" Great. Let it decompose outside my garden and then be introduced as compost. I've seen too many gardens with wood chips sitting on the top of the soil while the plants are struggling to get the nitrogen they need to grow to the next level.

Compost is already broken down. That means compost will protect your plants without stealing their food for its own purposes. Compost improves the soil structure and adds nutrients in the form that plants can best absorb it, all while supporting soil microbes, which are necessary for plant health.

(Note: It's really important to only use finished compost, or you risk unfinished compost pulling nitrogen from the soil to help it complete its decomposition, the same as mulch.)

Your soil should feed your plants, plain and simple.

Mulch Gives Garden Pests the Perfect Place to Hide

Reason number two (as if we need another one) is that mulch gives garden pests a wonderful little place to hide. So many of the pests that prey on the tenderest of our vegetable plants are hiders by nature. They know they're tiny and that they have a lot of predators. And so they've learned to make themselves invisible. Once they find a great place to hide, they nest... and they multiply.

Well, guess what? These pests love to hide underneath wood mulch. Each little piece of mulch you put in your vegetable garden is like a welcome sign for caterpillars and moths and slugs and snails that says, "Come on in! Here's a great little place to hide from all the birds and larger insects that want to eat you! It's nice and shaded!"

Whenever I added a nice, thick layer of wood mulch around my vegetables, I would dig around and find loads of roly-polies and all kinds of creepy crawlies hiding right underneath. I hadn't just crossed enemy lines. I'd led the enemies through a secret passageway into my base camp! And I'd given them the perfect camouflage!

I've also found that the larger the pieces of mulch, the better protection it gives critters of all shapes and sizes while they munch away on all your plants.

Don't create a welcoming habitat for the very insects you'd like to stay off your plants.

Instead of using mulch, keep a nice, clean surface of compost. Regularly use a hand rake to clear it of any debris. This way, you can easily spot pests that are trying to hide in the soil.

Mulch Takes Up Valuable Planting Space

To me, this is the most convincing reason to avoid mulch in your vegetable garden.

The typical way to plant a vegetable garden is to space plants every two to three feet apart. There might be an entire bed of cabbages or peppers or tomatoes. Once the 10 to 15 plants are in, the gardener steps back and thinks, "Okay, now I need to cover all this empty soil with mulch."

When I tell other gardeners I don't use mulch, the response I get is always something like: "Oh, well, my garden would never survive without mulch. It would just dry out." That's because they assume that I'm leaving all this bare soil.

But I don't. I plant it. Every square inch of your raised garden bed is prime real estate, my friends. It's like beachfront property. You've spent a ton of money to set up your raised beds and fill it with great soil, so why on earth would you give even a square inch of space to a piece of wood mulch? Wood mulch isn't going to give you food or add beauty to your life. It's just going to sit there and slowly turn into soil.

I'm also constantly sowing more seeds, and how are those little seeds supposed to push their way through a layer of mulch?

Plants Are the Best Alternatives to Mulch

Here's what I do instead of mulching: I break my plants into categories—large, medium, and small. After planting something large like tomatoes, I'd come right underneath the tomato plants and add medium plants like peppers and basil and bush beans, and then small plants like marigolds, arugula, oregano, rosemary, and thyme. I'm going to fill the entire bed with plants of different sizes.

It's true that leaving the soil bare is bad. But instead of solving the problem of bare soil with a bunch of wood chips, put some plants there. You will have to keep the garden watered really well for the first few weeks after planting. But after just six weeks, you shouldn't be able to see any bare soil at all. The plant mass will shade the soil and keep it from drying out, so there's no need for mulch.

Some people call this living mulch. I just call it packing in the plants or intensive planting. You can learn more about the intensive planting method in this post and in my book, Kitchen Garden Revival.

How to Garden Without Mulch

If you pack in those plants in your garden the way I do, then you do have to promise that you'll prune and harvest regularly. Using plant mass to protect your soil works. It keep pests at bay. It holds moisture in the soil so you don't have to water your garden as often. But it only works if you tend the garden weekly.

That's because your garden will, obviously, be packed with plants. They're growing right next to each other, instead of being spaced out like in a row garden, one tomato every two feet apart. Pruning and harvesting ensures each and every plant has the resources and space it needs to grow to its fullest potential.

Are You Ready to Ditch the Mulch?

But I live in a desert. But my garden dries out too quickly. But I don't want to spend all my time weeding!

I've heard all the excuses before, y'all. Trust me, I've used compost and the intensive planting method in lieu of mulch in my garden during extremely hot summers in Houston, Texas. I've grown this way in very cold places like Chicago, Illinois. I've grown this way without an irrigation system in my garden.

This system works if you work the system. You have to plant intensively, and you have to prune and harvest regularly. In return, you won't have to use wood mulch in your garden. That means no competition for nitrogen and no hiding places for pests. What you get instead is a productive and beautiful garden that's full of delicious plants when you plant my way.

So what do you think? Does mulch belong in a kitchen garden?

Whether or not you agree with me, thanks for being here and making gardening ordinary again!