It’s Time to Insulate Your Plants for Winter – Part 2
See part one for full details…
After you apply the pine mulch you need to make sure you gently hand-rake or move it away from against the stems or the trunks of the bushes and trees. Placing any sort of mulch too close to a tree-trunk will provide the conditions for the development of rot. If this sort of problem should happen, the damage cannot be undone, and the plant or plants will most likely die in a matter of seasons. Improper mulching will also provide an ideal home for rodents, which can also chew on plant stems or roots resulting in the death of the plant.
You should certainly mulch your fall-transplant trees and work on landscaping your plants as soon as you’ve planted and watered them. The pine mulch is needed to keep the soil warm and moist for as long as possible before the cold weather freezes the soil. Mulch helps to give the plants time for the roots of transplanted trees and shrubs to become well-established.
With the more established garden plants it is best to mulch earlier in the autumn if possible since doing so helps to retain the warmth in the soil and roots continue to grow for an extended period of time. Plants can benefit by absorbing more moisture as they head into colder months which puts them in much better shape. In the springtime you will of course need to remove the pine mulch from your perennial plants or at least pull it away soon as snow melts and the plants begin to flourish again. For other types of plants, trees, and shrubs you can leave the much as it is and simply refresh it.
Pine Straw mulch is really very important in the autumn since the perennials will harden as the fall season turns to winter. While plants may endure very low temperatures in the winter months, such temperatures in the fall may very well kill the plants since they aren’t fully hardened-off. This is why it is so critical to put your mulch in as early as possible. If there is a steep decline in temperatures in the fall you can rest-at-ease since the soil temperatures in your garden will drop much more slowly due to the mulched soil. In conclusion, I hope you learned a few new tip to help you with your fall mulch plans and your garden will be healthy and gorgeous next spring!
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