Re: Mulch is Bad!

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I was going over some photos I'd taken at Toro Regional Park near Salinas, California, and came across this one: http://www.flickr.com/photos/oxytone/524693049/in/set-72157600009916119

 

This is native soft chaparral, but ignoring the pathway, to the sides you can see that the native landscape has lots of bare soil (well mostly, there's a lot of dried out annuals that you can see) around the smaller subshrubs. I remember looking at the sages and Adenostoma and seeing a thin, but well distributed layer of mulch of dead leaves underneath them. 

 

That's something I'm really trying to replicate in my own landscape. It's not a pure native plant garden (I've got a number of non-native things) but I really am trying to emulate something more natural than man-made and shoe-horned into ideas of formality and "neatness".

 

I'd actually had good success in eliminating the non-native annual grasses, although pulling has resulted in some of them coming back up, of course.  At the same time, there are a number of areas where the soil is bare and the few weeds that do make it tend to be small, rather than lush and enormous in areas getting constant cultivation. Before I did any work, the ground was VERY heavily covered in weedy annual grasses, but over time these have been significantly reduced.

 

 

Barry

 

7 miles north of Monterey, California