Which Type of Mulch is Best for Berries and Grapes?

With all the fruit harvesting we’ve been doing over the last few weeks, I’ve had orchard care and maintenance on the brain.

Among the tools on my to-purchase list for my holistic management arsenal are cold-pressed fish hydrolysate, kaolin clay (for next year though), and neem oil. Although I’d like to get on a spring rotation with laying down the piles of ramial wood chips among the fruiting trees in the orchard, I’m eager to get the first pile down this fall, especially since there is a mountain where my husband works that is just free for the taking. In The Holistic Orchard, it is recommended that a pile is dumped annually, north side this year, east side next year, and so on. (Point being rotate the four corners, it needn’t be specific.)

Just like you, feeder roots like an array of nutrient choices and environments. The reception found beneath fresh ramial wood chips is different from that beneath a one-year-old pile or a two-year-old pile or the remnants of a three-year-old pile. All are worthy, just offering slightly different available nutrients and soil food web happenings.

Wood chips are specifically recommended for the orchard because trees thrive in a fungally-dominated soil food web.

But what about the berries and grapes? Do they prefer a bacterial or fungal dominance in their soil food webs?

I want to promote a healthy soil food web for all of our plants, annual or perennial, and feel a deep responsibility to properly steward their health, but more so now that I’m dealing with another family’s time and investment.

In other words, I don’t want to ruin all of their hard work!

I happened to listen to a podcast this weekend where soil biology was being discussed (I won’t link to it because I think it is no longer free to listen to) and I visited the website of the gentleman being interviewed. I thought I was understanding him properly when he was describing the scale from bacterial to fungal dominance in the food web and where different types of plants fell on it and found on their faq page a helpful reference that coincidentally has given me a clue as to how I should manage the berries and grapes in our orchard.

What type of environment do plants need?

Broccoli/Cabbage (Strongly bacterial)
Row Crops/Grasses (Slightly bacterial)
Berries (Equal bacteria and fungi)
Deciduous Trees/Vines (2-10 times more fungal)
Conifers (100+ more fungal than bacterial)
Note: Tomatoes are in the grass/row crop category, while strawberries, grapevines, kiwi, rhododendron, and snowbrush fall in the berry/vine/shrub category. Deciduous trees include poplar, almond, peach, citrus, coffee, apple, avocado and olive. Conifers include pines and most evergreens.

This was incredibly helpful! I was thinking that since they were fruit that I should mulch them like fruit trees and was planning on having a ton of wood chip mulch brought home.

Which Mulch is Best for Berries and Grapes?

Strawberries: Hay Mulch
Note: Slugs however love strawberries and love to hide in the hay mulch so I’ll wait until after fruiting next year to lay the mulch down. This should give the hay plenty of time to do it’s job and decompose over the winter and once the harvest is over, I’ll lay more down again. If I find the winter is harsh enough in any given year that protecting the berries with mulch is necessary, I would pull the hay completely off in the spring until after harvest. Or get ducks. And figure out how to keep them in the strawberries.

Raspberries & Blackberries: Woodsy compost
Note: This is not the same as ramial wood chips… much, much more decomposed and including green materials and therefore not as fungal. Quoting again from The Holistic Orchard:

An integrated orchard consists of far more than trees. The very same woodsy ecology principles apply to all sorts of berries. Fruiting brambles, bushes, and shrubs are the lower-lying understory of a productive fruit guild. -p.285

Incorporating a woodsy compost into the planting bed suits all brambles. Studies in Switzerland have shown that compost made from green material and wood chips produced the best results for nutrient availability and aeration around the roots and the highest levels of beneficial fungi. -p.287

Elderberry: Wood chips

Grapes: ???
I’m still undecided about grapes. And I’m open to suggestions. I’ve read the pros and cons of using everything from pomace (which I doubt we’d get enough of) to stones (which makes sense since grapes like that type of environment with the downside being it doesn’t give fertility back to the soil). Since they prefer equal bacteria and fungi, I’m not sure how to go about achieving that balance. I’ll probably tackle them similar to the brambles, I suppose.

Why does all this matter?

One of my goals as a gardener is to encourage the invisible life in the soil that will help the produce our land yields to have the optimal nutrient density and health.

Healthy plants are not only better for our health, but also are more resistant to disease and harmful pests. Investing the time into researching and using the most beneficial mulches makes my job easier in the end and hopefully, we’ll feel healthier too.

My plan to achieve this includes not tilling up the soil in the conventional way, but rather cultivating it. Tilling worked well for early America because fields were created from forest floors. It destroyed the soil food web and shocked the ground from it’s fungally-dominated state into a bacterially-dominated one. Annual vegetables and crops as mentioned above thrived in this environment but over time have depleted the soil of the nutrients that had been built up over the years. By not tilling, we can encourage that soil food web to rebuild itself in our gardens, but it requires carefully management through bacterial compost teas and (originally) green mulches that will nurture a bacterial environment for our vegetables.

Before I close, I want to bring a couple links on mulching to your attention:

First is Mulch and Soil Fertility from Organic Gardening. In it, the results of a study done by an Ohio State Research Team are discussed including which mulches are appropriate for which areas based on their carbon to nitrogen ratio.

Second is a Christian Farm and Homestead Radio broadcast from earlier this month where this article I just referenced and the topic of mulch gardening is discussed from a Biblical worldview. The host, Scott Terry, made some really excellent points and insight I’d never thought of before which I greatly appreciated.

And I’m not just saying that because he had some kind words to say about yours truly.