North American Fruit Explorers mailing list at ibiblio

[Sarah Kehler Ewing <skkewing@yahoo.com>]

Most fruiting things (besides Honeyberry and Haskap) like their soil a bit on 
the acid side and I don't see a sawdust mulch changing your pH enough to make 
that an issue.  The mulch itself didn't hurt my orchard: the trees with the 
mulch always grew better than the unmulched trees.

My concern with what you are doing involves the mouse habitat you are 
creating. I am quickly becoming a self-made expert in what brings mice into 
an orchard and my personal experience shows that your plan makes the nicest 
homes for mice who will then repay you by eating all the bark off your trees 
the very next winter even when you have 18" tall hardware cloth cages around 
each tree.  

I also used to mulch with sawdust from our local mills and I also used to 
make a doughnut of animal bedding out from the bases of all my trees.  I 
discovered the hard way that that trees aren't the only living things that 
loved what I was doing.  Won't do either of those things ever again.  

Sarah 
zone 3
Edmonton, AB


--- On Sat, 5/21/11, Evan <kodama@riseup.net> wrote:

> From: Evan <kodama@riseup.net>
> Subject: [NAFEX] Sawdust Mulching
> To: "North American Fruit Explorers" <nafex@lists.ibiblio.org>
> Received: Saturday, May 21, 2011, 1:44 PM
> I've got a source of pine sawdust
> that I've started using as mulch on some of my shrubs around
> the orchard. My process now is to mow the vegetation around
> each bush, lay down a slab of cardboard with a generous hole
> in the middle where the plant pops up and then cover the
> cardboard in about 1-2" of the pine sawdust and top it with
> the cleared vegetation. Due to my concerns about acidity,
> I'm prioritizing using this sawdust on blueberries, aronia,
> and serviceberry, which from the literature seems to be able
> to handle acidity... and so far on the native acid soil
> (5.4) with no amendments they seem to be doing well.
> 
> But I'm wondering about my other trees -- apples, pears, a
> quince, a peach, a couple kaki persimmons -- that sound like
> they prefer more neutral soils. I'd like to mulch them with
> sawdust too, but I'm wondering if it will make the soil too
> acid. I've thought about mixing in a little lime with the
> sawdust if I use it around those trees, thinking this might
> neutralize that acidifying effect.
> 
> Does anyone have experience or insight with this?
> 
> take root,
> Evan
> Zone 6, Southern Appalachians, 2800'
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