The Columbus-Amsterdam BID, which coordinates neighborhood-improvement efforts along those avenues, arranged for a bulk delivery of mulch from the city’s Parks Department, and asked for volunteers to help apply it to neighborhood treebeds.
The Parks mulch is made from last year’s dead leaves and grass trimmings and chipped branches, all of which have sat in a compost pile for many months and started to break down into a light brown humus.
Applying it as a top dressing helps the soil absorb moisture, introduces a slow trickle of organic nutrients as it continues to break down, and provides some texture to the soil to help resist compaction.
The process of tilling the existing soil, carrying over the mulch, and raking it in to an even layer only takes about ten minutes per treebed, but after the long stretch of relative inactivity over the winter, doing ten of these in a row left me tired out!
