Mulch or Compost ?

• Posted on 22 February 2025
• By JR
• 0

Mulch or Compost, What's What

A description of each of these common garden products will help determine where and when to use,  which. That's a lot of when, where and what for, but it's not really that much to know.

Mulch:

For all practical terms, mulch is a covering material for the garden-scape. It is most commonly used for aesthetic reasons. It just looks darn good and helps delineate the parts of the garden like; flower beds, perennial boarders and tree-scapes. It is also used to reduce maintenance in the garden. Placing mulch around trees makes trimming easier and in beds helps prevent weeds. It also holds in soil moisture by providing a barrier layer to evaporation. Like a moisture blanket. A true value in our Texas summers.

Mulch does not have to be an organic plant product and there are many forever mulches made of all manner of products, including old ground up tires. But, you won’t find any of that at the Growers Outlet. Mulch made from tree milling and maintenance is our bag.

Organic mulch is green. By that we mean, it has not been composted or (cooked). This is intentional as it last much longer in this fresh state providing greater life in your garden-scape. It takes time for the biological processes to breakdown the green mulch (compost it) into fine paticiles and nutrients, thus becoming part of the soil profile and disappearing.  This is one of the principle differences between mulch and compost as we will discuss next.

Compost:

On the other hand, compost is used to build our garden soils into a more healthy and productive media for growing vibrant plants.

Compost has gone through a decomposition process (cooked) to reduce the organic materials into smaller particles and release many of the nutrients contained within so that they are available to the soil microbes and our plants. This process of cooking can be principally done by bacterial organisms or fungi, or both. It does not need to be a hot process, but if not, it is a much longer process. That’s a lot to say.  Simply, there is a natural biological flow of renewal that takes place between plant litter, soil crawlies and microbes. The result is plant goodness. Thank you, Mother Nature.

There are many ways to use compost in the garden-scape. It can be spread over the lawn to bolster the health and vitality of the grass. Top dressing flower beds and shrubbery with a couple of inches of compost feeds the plants and increases the soil water capacity and is immensely beneficial. Even putting compost around trees provides long term studied prosperity. Think about an ancient forest. Probably the most common use is, just what my granddad and my dad after him did, till or fork it into the veggie garden. 

My nickel on the grass is, just use it anywhere you can. It isn't very expensive and adds fantastic bang for the buck. Put it down before you re-mulch beds in early spring and mulch right over the top of it. Spread it over the lawn before a nice spring rain. Most of the soil under our lawns is almost horrible and composting a few times a year will reduce your water bill and make your lawn the envy of the neighborhood. If you don't want to do a lot of hard work tilling it in, just don't. Put down compost and let the roly polies, beetles, earthworms and microbes do the work. They will be happy too.

Let’s Get Growing