Adjusting Mulch Timing and Thickness to Create Perfect Soil Microclimates

Using the suggestions for cool- and warm-season plants as a starting point, gardeners can also make adjustments to fit each crop based on your current and predicted soil moisture and weather.

Depending on the crop and time of the year, gardeners can keep mulch off to let the soil warm up and dry out or add mulch to retain soil moisture and coolness. In this way, gardeners can anticipate and fairly dramatically modify the conditions in separate areas of their garden to create the best microclimate for each crop simply by adjusting whether or not and how much to mulch during each part of the growing season and its typical heat and moisture. Gardeners can, similarly, quickly adapt to the specific dryness, wetness, coolness, or heat of any idiosyncratic year or part of a year by altering their typical mulch regime to fit the anomalous conditions.

It’s also important to remember that your climate may be quite different than that described above. Perhaps, yours is wetter, leaving you with no need for mulch at all (except to retard weed growth), or hotter and drier, leaving you with a much greater need for mulch earlier in the season. The point is that you use mulch as a tool to create the best microclimates for your plants.

For two helpful notes on mulching alliums, see this sidebar.

After reading all of this about mulch, many gardeners might be asking themselves, “What if, even with mulch, the soil is getting so dry that I have to water it? What is the best approach?”