Mulching in the Rain
May 22nd, 2018
Forget the weather forecast if you’re wondering if it’s going to rain.
I’m mulching in the rain… but not dancing around about it like Gene Kelly.
Just check if I’m planning to mulch.
Without fail, rain falls every year after the 8-cubic-yard pile of mulch shows up on my driveway.
It doesn’t matter whether meteorologists forecast rain or not. The mulch pile causes it, which is why I’ve given up trying to plan mulching around the forecast.
Next drought, I plan to order a pile.
This Murphy’s Law of Gardening happened again over the weekend when my neighborhood got an inch of steady rain to soak that big brown heap of shredded hardwood.
Read my list of 10 Murphy’s Laws that Apply to Gardening
Rain makes mulch twice as heavy, which in turn makes me twice as tired, twice as sore, and a few pounds heavier from water-soaked clothes.
Wet mulch also sticks, making it harder to spread and harder to clean off of the driveway in the end.
And running the wheelbarrow over wet ground is rough on the grass by flattening the crowns and compacting the soil underneath.
If I had lots of open time, I’d cover the pile and wait for nicer days. (It takes me two days to spread 8 yards of mulch.) But since my schedule usually dictates that I have one choice of weekends in the ideal mulching time frame, I’m forced to order the pile and hope for the best.
Mulching too early is bad because it traps cold moisture and keeps the soil from warming as fast. Wait too long, and the weeds are surging, plus the odds are better then of having to mulch in 90-degree heat instead of rain.
I try to make this heavy-duty job as easy as possible by timing it for that period between when the spring bulb foliage is yellowing (good time to cut) and when I install summer annuals and the season’s new round of trial plants.
It’s much harder trying to mulch around bulb foliage and/or a gazillion baby plants than it is to dump on open ground. Even without the new stuff, I don’t have much open ground. So my mulch project involves a lot of time-consuming, back-tiring bucket-filling and hand-spreading instead of the dump-and-rake job that non-plant-geek yards involve.
Although it sounds like it, I’m not complaining… just observing. Despite the extra work of mulching in the rain, there are advantages. The bright side:
1.) No worries about sun burn and no need to spend money on sun screen.
2.) No sweating as on hotter, more humid spring days.
3.) Mulch quickly cools once spread in the rain, meaning less chance of damaging plants from “hot” or “sour” mulch.
4.) And far and away the biggest plus, those dratted black flies that swarm and bite aren’t active during rains.
I’m sore and crampy as I write this, but the pile is gone, converted into thin layers all over my garden beds for another year. And as I look outside, the rain – of course – has stopped.