This might be just the ticket for all of my Autumn Olive. I've got a super sandy area within 50-100 yards, that I'm trying to get into native prairie and perrenials (clover chicory etc...) Hopefully after next year the only soil disturbance will be drilling some brassicas and rye into that spot. I've also got a few years worth of leaves composting near that same spot. We were thinking of how to incorporate more OM in one year, and we basically came up with sorghum, or hauling in,literally, a truck load of manure or something else. This seems like in one year I'll be able to get a pretty good amount of OM while accomplishing all of my other goals.
I'll be tilling at least twice this summer in between rye-buckwheat-fall mix. If I've got the whole process down, that tilling will be bringing up new weeds to burn down, AND incorporating the RWC. Adding organic matter while getting 2 good burns to make a clean seed bed seems like a pretty good deal! Now, if I pair those benefits with being able to use the AO that I'm cut and squirting rather than just letting it lay, I'm killing 3 pretty big birds with a fairly small stone!
This sure seems a lot cheaper/time efficient/safer than going to our "dump" where they offer free wood chips and loading up our little trailer with seeds from who knows what, or to pay someone to come bring some manure to a one acre field.
This is me thinking out loud in the presence of the planting masters.....
For mulching individual trees, I wonder if there is much of an advantage over hardwood chips mulch. I don't incorporate hardwood chips, but I DO incorporate a bit of "potting soil" (basically just topsoil), and some partially decomposed leaves. Last year, on all of my plantings(Dogwoods, pears, and apples. all on very sandy and at times droughty soil) I mulched with manure and a few inches of leaves. This year I'm planning to put an inch or so of manure and an inch or two of leaves under a solid 6 inches of hardwood chips. My results weren't bad last year, considering that I planted at basically the worst times (some in June, some in July and some in August), and I only lost one apple (which happened to be in sitting on top of what I later found to be solid muck) and a few ROD's (which were in super dry soil). They (the apples and pears) usually got a 5 gallon pail of water every week or two, but they weren't really pampered other than that.
I'm now wondering if the RWC would perform as well as the larger hardwood chips that we generally see for mulches, or if they are mainly advantageous in soil building. To me it would seem that the smaller the material, and the more easily it breaks down, the less longevity it would have and therefore the less effective it would be as a mulch. I'd say that because of the higher lignin content, conifers would be even better. Their bark is used in nursery potting mixes (and interestingly enough also in bonsai and container gardening mixes) because the high lignin makes them decompose very slowly. While I won't be purchasing any pine bark mulch for actual mulching, although I am using it in a potting mix for my oak seedlings, I might just switch my plan from using the hardwood chips to the RWC mulch.
