this post was submitted on 05 Dec 2023
16 points (100.0% liked)
Nature and Gardening
6660 readers
20 users here now
All things green, outdoors, and nature-y. Whether it's animals in their natural habitat, hiking trails and mountains, or planting a little garden for yourself (and everything in between), you can talk about it here.
See also our Environment community, which is focused on weather, climate, climate change, and stuff like that.
(It's not mandatory, but we also encourage providing a description of your image(s) for accessibility purposes! See here for a more detailed explanation and advice on how best to do this.)
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Sawdust or other high carbon/low nitrogen materials do use nitrogen from the surrounding soils - several studies have found that this effect is greatest within ~10mm or so. Materials with high surface area relative to the mass can exacerbate this effect.
We use the largest chips mostly for walking paths and between our rows in the annual veggie gardens. When we find pockets of really fine chips in the pile, we'll sift those and separate out the super fine material to use as potting mulch for the plants we pot up. The remaining chips are used in our compost piles or as bulk material for hugelkultur style raised gardens.
As far as species selection goes, there's not much preference. I think a variety of species gives the widest array of nutrients as they break down, which will in turn support a wider array of plants and animals making use of them.