June is a good time to mulch your garden, when your veggies’ soil has warmed up and you want to keep your plants from drying out. When the soil dries out, plants slow their growth or stop growing altogether. Swift, steady growth is important for the best-tasting fruits and vegetables.

The best thing about mulches is they keep our dry Okanagan soil evenly moist.

Mulches actually have MANY benefits:

1. They protect against soil erosion by breaking the force of those heavy rains we’ve been having this spring. Mulches help prevent soil compaction.
2. They discourage the growth of weeds and they reduce certain disease problems.
3. Mulches are insulators, making it possible to keep the soil warmer during cool weather and cooler during warm weather.
4. Organic mulches also improve the soil texture.
5. Many gardeners like to bring the tidy look of their perennials and borders to their garden and find it gives a neater appearance.

Gardeners Gold Compost Mulch, or your homemade compost, is ideal as an organic mulch that adds nutrients to the soil. Lawn clippings (may smell as it decomposes) are also used alot, as well as leaves, sawdust (preferably decomposed, requires added nitrogen), and straw (not hay which has lots of weed seeds) and a variety of non organic mulches. Of course nothing else quite compares to Dean’s vegi mulch for big healthy vegetables!