Cypress Mulch Update
If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
One of the things I really like to do is get a handle on how things work from both sides of an issue. I do this with almost every gardening thing that comes along - from chemical use to .. well, to Louisiana Mulch. Somehow I had a sense that the “problem” wasn’t quite as it was being described in the news release from the conservation group. (Anybody who believes every news release they get doesn’t get very many) 
So I wrote to the Louisiana Forest Products Development Center - a division of LSU - and got a response from Dr. Richard P. Vlosky, Director, Louisiana Forest Products Development Center, Professor, Forest Products Marketing in the School of Renewable Natural Resources at LSU in Baton Rouge.
As with many of these things, the issue is a tad more complicated than the press release led us to believe and not only that but it turns out that cypress logs are more valuable as timber and the majority of the mulch is actually produced from limbs and trimmings that have no other valuable use. As for harvesting and raping the land, again, the actual measurements show that only 3 counties are taking more timber from the land than nature is adding from the entire state.
Now. Does this mean there isn’t a problem? No it doesn’t because there are other issues at work here that probably include global warming, water quality and environmental degradation on larger scales than taking a few extra trees here and there. And the report doesn’t deal with those issues but only with the cypress industry.
It does mean the waterkeepers are much better at media manipulation than the woodlot owners though. 
In case, you’d like to see the report (and I encourage you to read it for yourself) here’s the download link to the pdf from LSU.
Me? I’m not using cypress mulch and probably wouldn’t if I lived in the South. I want a mulch to degrade and provide organic matter to my soils (particularly in the South where organic matter burns up in the heat) and Cypress mulch resists decay too much to do that for my organic gardening practices. Wouldn’t recommend it for that reason.
photo credit: edwardleger
I have posted this note from the WaterKeeper Organization (they've targeted garden writers and you'll see it posted all over the Net on different...
Roundup Resistant Weeds
Well what were we thinking? That glyphosate (sold as Roundup) would keep on killing weeds forever? Nope - we now have glyphosate-resistant weeds in 20...
Comments
Leave a Reply
-
Join Us
Stumble It!