Mulch to watch out for.

Yes! Now and officially this blog resides at amongtheweeds.ca as well as sungarden.wordpress.com so please use the former address when linking to me because the .ca address is a much truer representation of what’s going on in my backyard than “sungarden” will ever be. I’m north-facing and on top of that live in the “rain city” Vanouver….. I just picked that title last year when we were having a sunnier-than-average summer and I was feeling optimistic.  At this moment my garden is deluged from two days of downpour, making me glad for raised beds that drain well.

On my way out to an event last night I stopped at our big box store (only in a pinch) to pick up some bags of mulch for a path my partner is building to connect our veggie-growing area and the patio. You would have thought the five yards of mulch I ordered in the fall would have been enough to meet all my needs for years to come, but of that original order we only have a half a garbage bag left. I suppose that’s to be expected when you mulch half your yard!

So, there we are, B. loading up 3 bags of chipped bark into our shopping cart and me looking around at the other mulches and soil ammenders when I realize that the bags we are about to purchase are marked “ColorFast”. As in, they are dyed and guaranteed not to fade.

Call me naive, but until that moment I had never considered the possibility that a bark mulch might be dyed in order to satisfy the aesthetic demands of consumers.  Can that be environmentally sound? Would my garden still be “organic” if I put a dyed product in it?

While I recognize there are organic dyes available which might not have a huge ecological footprint, the brand we were looking at had no such guarantee on the bag and so B. quickly returned them to the shelf in favour of a non-treated bark mulch product that had “eco” in the title. Who knows how eco this product actually is…. but it does look a heck of a lot more natural… so I can probably fool myself into forgetting that it could also be toxic. This stuff isn’t going around my plants so I’m not overly fussed about it, but was again reminded of why I prefer to purchase products like these from my local garden center rather than the big box home reno stores. While the garden center may sell objectionable product, there is always more than one product to choose from, and very often an organic option available. As much as possible, I don’t want to contribute further to the contamination of groundwater and the surrounding soil.

I’m thinking if the rain holds off, this evening might be the one for scratching up the lawn and scattering our grass seed to remediate the mud pit between our patio and veggie beds. We’re away over the long weekend, so as much as possible we’re putting our yard in place as the weather allows. I’m hoping that by the end of April all the bones will be in and we’ll have moved on to planting, weeding and upkeep instead of the heavy labour we’re doing right now!