Living Mulch in the Permaculture Garden

Why mulching? Some of the benefits are that it retains moisture, prevents erosion, fertilizes, and suppresses weeds. To me, the reason to mulch is to suppress weeds. In my garden, the words edible and permaculture are most important. Thinking of mulching in a permaculture way, we wondered if it’s possible to use ground cover plants to suppress the weeds so we don’t have to apply any mulch, ever. After consulting Google, the answer is YES, and it’s called living mulch.

Either annual or perennials can be used for living mulch. But why bother with annual? We busy gardeners barely find time to plant and harvest, let alone plant annuals as living mulch. The best living mulch plants for me must be perennial, grow steady and quickly, and be deer resistant and edible (although after the living mulch was established, I rarely ever eat any of those living mulch plants).

Let’s check out the ground cover plants in my garden. If you live in zone 5, with deer roaming freely, you might want to give it a try.

For full sun, we planted woolly thyme and Elfin thyme. Started with nine 3-inch woolly thyme plants purchased from our local nursery ($4.99 each). The pictures below were taken from the second and third year of being in our garden.

Then we dug several thyme patches from this flower bed and moved them to other sunny area like this:

Elfin thyme spreads much slower. Start with eight 3-inch starter plants, it took 4 years to cover the base of this tree.

In another small full sun area we planted creeping phlox and violet Johnny-Jump-Up. Creeping phlox comes back and expands every year. Johnny-Jump-Up just self-sow and started grow in early Spring. Considered as one of the most colorful of all ground covers, creeping phlox surely brighten up our garden in spring.

For ground cover in shade, we tried a lot of varieties: spotted deadnettles, Ostrich fern, bugleweed, sweet woodruff (pictured below), and periwrinkles. They all survived but didn’t spread as expected because the area under the trees only gets rain water in Spring. Sweet woodruff performed a little bit better. It produced seeds before die back in summer so it expanded next year. Still, it’s hard to fully cover an area in 2-3 years.

The best ground cover for shade to partial shade is golden creeping jenny. A lot of gardeners mentioned that creeping jenny was so invasive and it would definitely be out of control. We tested golden creeping jenny from Home Depot (it seems that green creeping jenny is more invasive) in an isolated area and it worked perfectly. It survived, spread, and the best thing is that we don’t have to buy a lot of starter plants like other ground cover we tested–just take cuttings from the established patches (about 5-7″ long), poke a hole in ground, and insert the cutting and firm the soil. We did this in spring when we get a lot of rain and they quickly covered our flower bed and tree beds in front yard, not taking over our lawn. In Summer, the more water we provide, the faster it spreads. Here are several locations.

1. in full sun flower bed. It didn’t choke any of the tall perennial plants but suppressed all the weeds. For smaller plants that we just planted, we need to pull the creeping jenny to give those plants some space. It’s not hard to do and only took about 5-10 minutes every month.

2. Partial shade.

3. Shade area. The color is green instead of gold.

4. Creeping jenny spread slower In back yard since it’s not covered by the sprinkler. Still it’s the best result compare to other ground cover we tested.

Every spring, all kinds of living mulch create a beautiful and aesthetically pleasing garden. It saved us much more cash than to apply regular mulch all around. What’s not to like? Sounds like a good idea? Give it a try!