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Much ado about mulch

© Lorraine Flanigan

Here in Toronto, we've yet to see many days of grey skies and snow-frosted mornings, but I know they're on the way. That's why I've been scurrying around the neighbourhood collecting bags of leaves (gosh I hate those new brown paper bags - they're a soggy mess in the rain and you can't see the leaves inside. How is a manic mulcher to know whether they're bags of maple or ash?). Winter is hard enough on the people who live and work in southern Ontario - one day it's damp, cold and sleeting with rain while the next we bask in sunshine wearing the lightest of fall jackets as we listen to tomorrow's forecast of snow.

These extreme and sudden changes in the weather are just as hard on plants as they are on us. If she were more accommodating, Mother Nature would dump a foot of snow on our gardens at the beginning of winter, top it up all winter long, then arrange a slow spring thaw. A consistently deep layer of snow is the garden's best protection against the variable weather conditions that we experience over the winter. Snow keeps the soil temperatures consistently cold - just the way dormant plant roots like it.

Without a reliably deep layer of snow though, the best thing we can do for our gardens is to give them a protective winter mulch. Other than time, it'll cost you nothing. That's because one of the best mulches around is being carefully bagged and disposed of at the end of every driveway in your neighbourhood, free for the taking - leaves.

The ideal leaves for mulching are small, dry and curled, the kind dropped from mountain ash, birch, willow or apple trees. Small leaves like these make a "flufflier" mulch than the larger leaves from trees like Manitoba and Norway maples. It's like the difference between a wool blanket and one made of synthetic fibres - unlike the synthetic one, the wool blanket breathes. In the garden, a fluffy mulch acts just like a woolen blanket, letting the soil breathe beneath it, allowing moisture and air through to the surface while at the same time trapping snow in the spaces between the leaves.

If all you have, or all you can find are large maple leaves though, shred or chop them using a shredder (rent one if you can find one) or run them over with the lawn mower until they're finely chopped. Another method that I've used in the past is to half fill a plastic garbage can with leaves. Wearing safety goggles, lower a grass trimmer into leaves, whipping them with the trimmer until they're chopped.