Photo Credit: Justin Kapfer

The smell of pine-bark mulch always takes me back to spring Saturdays during my childhood. The ground warmed up comparatively early where I grew up in western North Carolina and, come late March or early April, my dad and I would spend a whole day mulching the little beds and borders that dotted our hilly, tree-crammed half-acre yard. There’s something very vivid about the peaty smoke that rises from a big pile of mulch when you rake it flat on a cool morning. To me, it has always signaled the coming of better times.

Of course, spring mulching is an essential chore in any garden: a three-inch layer of organic material will suppress weeds, add nutrients, and retain moisture wherever you put it, fostering much healthier plant growth and saving you endless weeding in the future. I made the mistake of skipping the mulch one spring several years ago and lived to rue the day: after two months of battling the spurge and dandelions that renewed themselves, like hydra’s heads, every time I cut them, I finally ordered several yards of the good stuff in mid-June. Spreading mulch is not nearly so evocative or fun when it’s hot out. I swore to myself that I’d never be so foolish again.

Our finished compost is sifted by hand using a compost sifter before we bring it out to the beds and trees to spread it. This process removes any large clumps and oxygenates the compost, making it not only healthier but easier to spread.

Yet as I’ve learned more about plants and gardens over the years I have come to realize that, as essential as spring mulching may be, there are many plants that benefit just as much from what’s called a winter mulching. We call it a winter mulching not because you actually do it during the coldest months but because you do it in fall to prepare your plants for those dark and dormant times.

Our young orchard trees getting their roots dressed for the winter.

Roses are famously fond of winter mulch, but many other plants, shrubs, and trees will benefit. The main advantage of putting on mulch for winter is that it protects the shallow root systems from surface frost: an essential strategy here in New England, where the winter weather gets very cold indeed. But, if what you’re mulching with is good, homemade organic compost, the plant gets the added benefit of having its roots washed with all of that nutrition as the winter rains soak it into the soil.

If at all possible, you should always mulch with organic material—leaves, grass clippings, or shredded bark will do if you don’t have compost—rather than the bagged mulch you find at big-box home improvement stores. Apart from the fact that these bags must be thrown away once we use the mulch, adding tons of plastic to our landfills, most of the colorful mulch you can buy in those places is actually dyed with paint—not exactly the sort of thing you want to be adding to the ground around tender plants. If you have large areas that need mulching, seek out a local organic farm that sells it

(In our area, incidentally, I’ll be an eternal fan of the Terra Mulch from Bricks Ends Farm in Hamilton, MA, which is as light as paper, deeply nutritious, and smells like pipe tobacco when the sun heats it). Whatever you do, avoid plastic garden sheeting at all costs: it starves the plants and pollutes the soil at the same time, not to mention making life hellish for whoever comes after you trying to plant anything new.

Though perhaps not as romantic as the spring mulching, winter mulching is an ideal way to ensure that your plants are healthy, disease-resistant, and richly green next summer. As with so many things, winter mulching is a way of laying up good things for the future; a liturgical moment of faithfulness and anticipation whose fruits will be especially rich because we’ve had to wait so long to enjoy them.