Hello all. So I have a comparable question though I believe I may be a bit more savvy in my method. I am raising my primary garden veggie bed and attempting to re-start a 12 x 13 ft vegetable garden and am considering dumping several --6 to 8 inches of wood mulch (or more!) on it in the next few weeks with the idea that a lot will break down over the winter and be ready for some top-dressed compost around new veggies in the spring. I have HEAVY clay soil here and have fought this yard for 4 summers with very little luck. My veggies are average at best over the last few years; I've brought in YARDS of sand; composted horse manure; real topsoil; mushroom compost and surround the veggies with my vermicast each spring. Today, I just finished putting a limestone rock border around the area and it could likely handle approximately 14-18 inches of mulch. My clay soil (soil is probably a misnomer and I hate to even call it that) EATS all amendments I add and I am at my wits end. With 6 or 7 months of time for an obviously heavy amount of free mulch from the city, I can likely get at least a foot on there. How much do you think it will break down in 6 months? Hopefully I won't get walnut mulch again which happened at a different house. At this point in the year I'll get some greens left which will get a bit of thermophilic composting going on so I'm expecting a bit of heat, but I think I'm ok with a foot of wood mulch. I'm going to remove the asparagus I have planted there prior and I'll be able to start 'fresh' with a new spot in the spring. I can (and may have to) remove a few inches in the spring if need be which I'm willing to do. I SO want to drop two feet on there and then 'skim' it in the spring. This clay is a beast and I'm trying to prepare for next year. I am a seasoned gardener and I'm getting schooled by this awful soil and I can't afford thousands of dollars in compost over the next several years. I dump hundreds of dollars each year into this spot and am underwhelming my wife's expectations. The raised piece is my last hope. Thoughts?

"This is just silly." To this, I will agree and say, "no $+hit!" As for the "DAFT" comment, no need to be rude. I find WalMart to usually have many QUALITY products at a fair price, which some snobs do not dare tread out of fear of catching cooties. I shop at WalMart frequently and save money every time. I am very frugal and know how to shop and how to spend. As for Scott's: their days are numbered. I didn't want a recurrence of last year. As for being embarrassed for posting, why should I? We should all be able to expect a quality product from the manufacturer. It doesn't matter if it's dog food, carpet cleaner, or mulch. Performance matters. QUALITY CONTROL SUCKED AT THE MULCH FACILITY. When that cypress was sent through the chipper, it had all kinds of "road trash" or underbrush debris. The company didn't care and they sent it on to the consumer. You seem to forget, I am not the only person that had the same results. This was NOT a 'one bag' problem. Many of the people I came into contact with that bought the exact same mulch had similar problems. Furthermore, FYI the nursery that I usually purchased my pine mulch from was 'out' of cypress mulch, hence 'why' I bought bagged mulch from WalMart; plus they were a quarter a bag cheaper than HD at the time of purchase. Do the math... :D Had the mulch been a quality product, there would have been no problems. Let's let this be the end of talking about this mulch. This truly is old news. OK? Peace.

I use cypress bark mulch and cyprus tree needles for mulch. But NOT in the tomato beds! Cyprus tree needles, cypress bark mulch and pine needles are great for mulching ornamental beds especially in shade gardens and for bedding plants and ornamentals that enjoy a slightly acid and damp soil. You might assume those parameters include tomatoes. Yes. But the pine needles, cypress needles and ESPECIALLY the cypress "bark" mulch (most of which products include large amounts of sap wood and slab wood chips from the cypress milling) are very slow to rot. And that's why I don't use them in the tomato beds ... because they take too long to break down to where the stuff can be tilled, incorporated, into the soil year to year. Wheat straw is the best annually applied mulch, in my opinion. Alfalfa hay is another good option but contains too many seeds, IMO. I like to put the clean wheat straw on in "leaves" pulled off the square bales so the resulting mat is about 2 to 3 inches thick laid down kind of like tiles on a floor. Then I spread the shake over that mat another thin inch thick. The resulting straw mulch mat rots slowly over the summer season so it never heats up like grass clippings (although grass clippings are an excellent mulch) and by autumn the straw is rotted about 3/4 of the way into humus. Then I remove all the tomato vine and tomato plant residue from the bed and blow the leaves from the lawn into the beds and run the mulching lawn mower over the dry leaves to break them up into leaf mulch left to rot over the winter. The reason I don't use much grass clipping mulch any longer is that I prefer to mow the lawn unbagged with a mulching mower and leave the grass clippings on the lawn for free nitrogen. Also, I use crab grass and broadleaf herbicide on my lawn and do not want that residue in my tomato patch. The pine and cypress needles I apply each spring in Brenda's ornamental and annual beds do break down. Just much more slowly than wheat straw. But we love the needles for mulch in flower beds especially because they don't wash out or float off like wood chips tend to do and they smell fresh and don't mildew. The cypress "bark" mulch, particularly the products that include cypress wood chips have taken up to 2 years to rot down to where I need to add a new topping around the shrub plantings where cypress is a great product. Also, I don't notice mildew and insects so much in cypress mulch as is more common with hardwood mulch.

It depends...if you're like me and have wildlife issue then I like to leave ALL the wood on for the winter.