25-05-2004, 05:18 PM
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Red pine needles as mulch?
In article , (simy1) wrote:
One last advice: your soil is almost certainly acid and will be more
acid still with needles. If you start seeing a pattern where garlic
does better than onions, or potatoes do well but beets or chard don't,
add much more wood ash or lime. Just to give you an idea, in a 30X4
bed, you have approximately 10 tons of dirt. If the pH is 5.4, it will
take approximately 2 pounds of ash to take it to 6.4, but 20 pounds of
ash are needed to take it to 6.65.
My soil is so alkaline it makes a soil tester act broken (it's
somewhere above 8.0), and you can see the difference under some of the
pines in that what does grow there (tumbleweeds, mustard, native grass
but not fescues) looks healthier than elsewhere. But as you say pine
straw generally does inhibit seed germination -- makes it a good mulch
for keeping down general weeds.
Oaks similarly inhibit seed germination, in fact the Calif. scrub oaks
pretty well sterilize the soil underneath them, and it takes several
years for the leaf mulch to break down enough that anything will
sprout.
~REZ~
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