Living soil basics: Mulching
What is mulching?
Mulching is covering the soil to provide protection from erosion. Mulching will allow the soil to build structure, create better conditions for biology to thrive and increase the efficiency of watering. We like to encourage the use of organic matter as a mulch material in an indoor/Greenhouse setting such as barley straw or hemp mulch. Mulching indoors will help to protect soil from the erosion caused by powerful artificial lighting it will also reduce the amount of water lost through evaporation. Outdoors, particularly here in the UK, we suggest using compost as a mulch because it wont attract slugs to your beds and is fairly easy to produce yourself.
How do I mulch?
There are numerous ways and materials that you could use to mulch. Outdoors we generally use compost to cover beds as well as barley straw. we also like to use good quality woodchips to create paths helping to form mycelial connections between the beds. In the Greenhouse you could mulch the stems and leaves from past crops to build a mulch layer. If you don't have any mulch material then buying a clean source like barley straw or hemp mulch is a great option.
We hope you found this informative
Happy growing
W.P.C