The Best Mulch For Fruit Trees And What Never To Do
The best mulch for fruit frees will not just protect your soil, retain moisture, and suppress weeds — it can boost the immune system of your trees and help them fight off disease. All while looking great.
What Is The Best Mulch For Fruit Trees?
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The best mulch for fruit trees — is more wood. You want wood chips, ramial chipped wood, and leaves — you want to mimic the environment that trees live in. Unlike your veggie garden, you want a fungal-dominant environment for fruit trees to thrive, and mulch is a big part of that process.
The best way to ensure the success of your fruit trees is to mimic the natural environment of a forest floor. In the woods, leaves, branches, and other organic materials fall to the floor, creating a beneficial organic mulch that provides incredible benefits to the growing trees.
It is a myth that wood chip mulches steal nitrogen from growing plants as the wood breaks down.
In reality, only the very top bit of the soil is affected, which should not interfere with your fruit tree roots. If you’re not tilling the wood into your soil, it will not have any negative effects.
Why Mulch Fruit Trees
Nature abhors bare soil and doesn’t keep it that way for long.
Aside from recreating a forest-floor environment for your trees, we mulch to help retain moisture and reduce the need for watering, to regulate the soil temperature, and to suppress unwanted weeds and plants from sprouting up.
Mulch will also gradually build up soil fertility as it composts. This lets us determine what to plant around our trees. In field tests and experiments, mulched trees and bushes grow faster and are healthier which allow them to produce better fruit and more of it. Young fruit trees are particularly given a boost at a vulnerable time when they’re just getting established.
The best mulches for fruit trees attract beneficial organisms and bacteria that help transform the soil from a bacterial-dominant one (great for your vegetable garden) into the fungal-dominant soil that trees need to thrive.
Wood Chips
Wood chips are available for free from your local arborists. These loads usually contain a mixture of both hard and soft woods, with randomly sized chunks, some branches, some bark, and occasionally logs. The benefits of wood chips are numerous, particularly for trees, and it’s readily available, making it a popular choice. However, be prepared to handle the significant volumes that come with a full truckload, which can be around 20-30 yards of wood chips.
It’s fantastic stuff, and it’s readily available, so it’s popular for good reason, as the benefits of wood chips are numerous, especially for trees.
Be prepared to deal with the massive volumes that a full truck will deliver, as this will be 20-30 yards of wood chips.
Ramial Mulch
As you prune your fruit and other trees, or if you can get your hands on these young branches from prunings, you wll find something relatively new that was previously under-studied and thus not well understood.
But this ramial chipped wood is likely one of the most perfect mulches for your fruit trees.
Those young tree branches left over from pruning are RICH in the nutrients fruit trees need in the “cambium,” or what is the living tissue in the branches.
If you can cut these up into 1-inch pieces or put them through a wood chipper, they will eventually decompose, and the vast array of beneficial nutrients will be released into the soil to feed your trees.
This type of mulch is different from other wood chip mulches, and most wood chips you buy or get are from older trees that do not contain this cambium.
And ramial chipped wood from something like willow branches have the incredible benefit of boosting the immune system of your trees due to the presence of salicylic acid (yes — a component of aspirin — and also a pore-cleaning facial product), which helps fruit trees fight pests and diseases!
Straw & Hay Mulch
Using straw or hay as mulch can be a great idea, but it’s important to ensure that they don’t contain weed seeds. When using straw as mulch, it’s better to opt for chopped straw which is weed-free and has the added benefit of being almost dust-free. For hay, it’s best to use older products that are no longer fit for animal feed as they are cheaper and more suitable. Chopped straw, also known as garden straw, is ideal for managing a chicken coop with deep litter as well as for mulching raised garden beds, including strawberries.
And as for hay, getting older product that is no longer suitable for animal feed is cheaper and better.
Chopped straw is also called garden straw, and it’s what we use for our chicken coop deep litter method of management.
We also use it to mulch our strawberries and other raised garden beds.
Cedar Mulch
Cedar mulch looks great, smells fantastic, works as a mulch should and also contains cedar oil which can repel certain pests like some ants and even termites.
Pine Mulch
Pine mulch from chipped pine trees is generally not good to use around fruit trees because it can make the soil more acidic. Trees and fruit trees do not thrive in overly acidic soil but rather one that is fungal-dominated.
Hardwood Mulch
Hardwood mulch is made from hardwood trees and it breaks down much faster than something like cedar.
Shredded Paper
Surprisingly, shredded paper is not bad as a mulch option. If you have a ton of it at the office — bring it home. But you may want to put it under a layer of wood chips or at least wet it down thoroughly. Shredded paper matts together over time to form a layer that prevents weeds.
It’s low in nutrition but will still help suppress weeds.
Bark Mulch
Bark is made up of larger chunks of wood bark. This type of mulch takes many years to break down and it may leave your tree roots too wet. It is not an ideal mulch and would work better if mixed with wood chips and similar.
Compost
Yes! compost can be used as a mulch itself! A layer of mixed compost, including manure and mushroom compost, will work to protect and nourish your fruit trees.
Learn More: Using Compost as Mulch for a Healthy & Thriving Garden
How To Mulch Fruit Trees
Although not strictly necessary, it’s a good idea to sheet mulch the area where your fruit trees will be planted.
Sheet mulching has three primary components: the weed suppression layer which smothers what is already growing there (grass and weeds), the planting medium, and then the actual mulch is placed on top.
I highly recommend a couple layers of overlapping cardboard or cardboard and newspaper as the smother and suppress layer. You can do this around a tree that has already been planted or you can do this ahead of time to prepare the area for eventual planting.
Add Compost
Once your fruit tree is planted and the ground around it is firmly tamped down — add a layer of compost on top.
You will want about 3 inches of compost spread out on top of the soil around the tree trunk, going out about 3-4 feet for best results. Do this even if you are not sheet mulching.
The best compost for trees includes mushroom compost and worm castings or a mixture of the two.
If you only have manure, try to source chicken or rabbit manures that have a higher NPK compared to other animals such as cows, horses, and sheep.
Add Mulch Around the Fruit Tree
Now it’s time to mulch around the fruit tree and you will want to do this properly. Think of the mulch as looking like a fluffy donut ring around your tree that doesn’t touch the trunk.
The best mulch is probably shredded leaves (not whole leaves!) topped with wood chips. If you have ramial chipped wood — add that into the wood chips as it’s a fantastic green manure and mulch for trees.
Ramial chipped wood might be the single BEST thing if you can get it or make it and I will discuss that more below.
The shredded leaf mulch layer should be 1-2 inches and the wood chip mulch should be another 2 inches. Feel free to add pine cones, twigs, etc.
You will ideally mulch up to 4 feet away from all sides of the trunk in a circle.
This will start the soil underneath and transform it into a fungal-dominant system that will make for the healthiest, happiest trees.
Avoid Volcano Mulching
This is the single biggest mistake people make when mulching their fruit trees — piling the mulch up and around the sides of the tree trunk aka the mulch volcano.
It’s not good for your tree or the roots. Avoid this.
Refresh Mulch
The best mulch for fruit trees takes a long time to break down. Add more twigs, shredded leaves, and wood chips each fall or spring as you work in your orchard.
The beauty of trees like fruit trees is that, once planted, they require very little maintenance and upkeep — unlike an annual garden that involves regular attention. As the season goes on and you accrue organic matter like pine needles, grass clippings, etc, you can add them to the base of the tree too.
Benefits of Wood Mulch
Learn More: 13 Benefits Of Wood Mulch In Your Garden {Wood Chips Vs Mulch}
