Bill Oliver wrote:

My county gives away free mulch. People bring in downed trees,
branches, etc. to the county dump, where it is ground up and put in
huge piles.* Up here in Appalacia, there's lots of downed wood.

Thus, we have an essentially limitless source of free mulch.* The mulch
isn't all that pretty, and is probably considered low quality; it is
mostly ground hardwood with a sizeable minority of pine and a
sprinkling of random woody brush.

The other day I was down there shoveling the stuff into the back of my
pickup (the county has a frontloader that provides a filling service on
an irregular basis, but I always seem to miss it), and the caretaker
came running out of his shady spot yelling at me to stop.

He said that I was taking the mulch from the wrong pile -- that the
stuff I was loading had just been ground that day and would kill my
plants, particularly if there was a lot of pine in it.* He said that
mulch had to sit for a couple of weeks and ferment a little before it
could safely be used.* He strongly suggested that if I was using the
mulch for flower garden that I use the next pile over, which had been
sitting for a couple of weeks. He said that the pile I was digging
from would be good for driveways and walkways, but that I should
be careful about using it around plants.

I had never heard of that.* Is that so?* Does mulch have to "age?"

billo

We only use fresh chips for walkways and along fence lines to keep weeds
down a bit.*** Since we chip our own, we can do a batch that's just* -*
long dead
if we want to put it around trees.*** New wood, especially pine has always
been
termed..................turpentiny................ ......not my word believe
me.
But no one uses it in garens.

Ma
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