Mulch

Mulch mindfully. If you have newly planted trees or even old ones, consider mulching them to protect from mowers and weed whackers near their trunks. This is the main cause of tree death. Make sure mulch is not up against the trunk; this causes the bark to get moist and rot, which promotes disease. Keeping the trunk exposed encourages good tree health and stability. Mulching properly helps reduce temperature fluctuations in the soil and retain moisture. Grass also takes valuable water from the tree's root system.

There's little left of the tons of leaves that area residents dutifully raked to their curbs or collected in brown paper bags. The hefty piles have been vacuumed up by noisy machines, and the bags have been heaved onto open- back trucks. Either way, the broad maple, jagged oak and delicate weeping willow leaves have largely disappeared from front yards. But in many municipalities, the discarded leaves will return this spring and summer - as garden mulch to keep the weeds from engulfing the tomatoes or to enhance elegant landscaping.

From early December until shortly after New Year's, they are a key part of holiday celebrations, the center of family gatherings. Thereafter, Christmas trees are nothing but a disposal problem. The solution, depending upon where one lives, seems to rest somewhere between chippers, chopping, landfills and bonfires. Tredyffrin Township is offering its residents the chance to say goodbye to their Christmas trees today by taking them to the leaf-composting center on Cassatt Road near the Philadelphia Electric terminals from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. The trees will become part of the compost used by the township to help nurture foliage through the year.

Christmas comes once a year but the holiday trees hang around indefinitely - in various forms. At the Churchville Nature Center in Bucks County, suburban park explorers might find themselves walking on their very own Christmas trees in the spring. The center takes any donated trees and chips them into a mulch that is used on park trails. In post-Christmas tradition, a county forester hauls in a chipper and processes about 1,000 trees before the season is over on Jan. 21, according to assistant park naturalist Kristen Benson.

In a previous life, the fragrant boughs held bright tinsel and balls of delicate glass. A few months hence, they will rest near scenes of more natural beauty - woodland paths and beds of flowers. But now, the limbs, trunks and needles of 30,000 to 40,000 Philadelphia Christmas trees are just sitting, waiting for a home, in mammoth woodpiles at the Pennypack Environmental Center and two other locations. The mulch created by chopping the trees into tiny pieces with mulchers is available free to anyone who comes to pick it up, said Robert Grow, park manager for the Fairmount Park Commission.

Forty years ago, few Main Line estates were without their own leaf mulch piles - restocked season after season, recalled John DiJiosia Jr., co-owner of Plymouth Nursery. As land parcels grew smaller, muncipalities went into the leaf-collection business. And some, like Upper Moreland Township, are finding themselves shoulder deep in leaf mulch. So they are marketing the product to residents and landscapers. For several years, DiJiosia has been using leaves stockpiled by Plymouth Township.

We've all heard about supersize alligators roaming the sewers. Now, there's an e-mail crisscrossing cyberspace warning gardeners about killer mulch made from termite-infested New Orleans trees. "Be very careful about buying mulch this year," the e-mail warns. "Formosan termites will be the bonus in many of those bags. " Not true, the experts say. Trees felled by Hurricane Katrina, termite-infested or otherwise, are not being shredded into mulch to sell to unsuspecting customers at Home Depot and Lowe's stores for "dirt-cheap prices" this spring.

Here's a more definitive answer to the question posed by a reader with stains from wood mulch on his vinyl siding, thanks to Joe Ponessa, the Rutgers professor, and reader Anthony Canamucio of Bensalem. Both Ponessa and Canamucio say the stains sound like "artillery fungus. " Canamucio says many of his neighbors have had problems with artillery fungus, which, he says, has proven to be impossible to remove from the vinyl siding. One preventive measure suggested is to aerate the mulch at least a couple of times a year.

After a year of trashing Christmas trees, Philadelphia has decided to do the right thing. It's shipping tons of them to a big wood chipper in the suburbs - even though it's a more expensive way to get them out of town. Truckload by truckload, the trees are being dispatched to Bucks County to be turned into environmentally beneficial mulch. The mulch then will be used for landscaping at the same landfill that takes Philly's trash - and at the nearby offices of Waste Management of North America.

WHAT HAPPENS TO ALL those Christmas trees after the holidays? Well, the Bucks County Parks and Recreation Department plans to mulch between 7,000 and 10,000 trees as part of a free community service it offers. Above, Jim Poiron loads a tree into the mulcher as fellow parks department worker Bruce Graham watches at Silver Lake Nature Center. Below, the mulch is dumped at the nature center maintenance facility by Poiron (background) and Graham.

Mulch mindfully. If you have newly planted trees or even old ones, consider mulching them to protect from mowers and weed whackers near their trunks. This is the main cause of tree death. Make sure mulch is not up against the trunk; this causes the bark to get moist and rot, which promotes disease. Keeping the trunk exposed encourages good tree health and stability. Mulching properly helps reduce temperature fluctuations in the soil and retain moisture. Grass also takes valuable water from the tree's root system.

Plant regular, dwarf, and pillar (tall and narrow) fruit trees for next year. They can be placed in the ground or in containers with a diameter of 36 inches or more. For workshops, check out the nonprofit Philly Orchard Project at http://www.phillyorchards.org/ . Dress up perennial borders with fall-blooming mums. Select varieties with a lot of buds so you'll have a longer bloom period, and make sure they are hardy for our region, meaning they will survive the winter.

Because of the rainy weather, mushrooms have been cropping up all over, but that doesn't make them a crop to eat. Don't even try to identify harmless ones, warns Rebecca Boylan, consumer horticulturalist with the Penn State Cooperative Extension in Montgomery County. "We always assume that nothing is edible," she said. Even if you can see animal bite marks. At least four people in New Jersey were hospitalized this week after ingesting wild mushrooms, according to the state's Poison Information and Education System.

The world around us is a dead giveaway for what we can expect next. When sweet corn is in tassel mode and the goldenrod begins to break into its autumn hue, for example, gorgeous fall mums can't be far behind. Within the next few weeks, they'll be making their way into garden centers, nurseries, and your favorite roadside stands. Mums sold this time of year are called hardy mums. Those sold at Easter and Mother's Day are dubbed florist mums, nonhardy plants that you can transplant to the garden to give foliage texture (sadly, they will not rebloom or overwinter)

Question: We have fir and ornamental flowering trees at our Chester Springs house. What is the proper way to mulch around the tree trunks? Our yard service adds new mulch on top of the old each year, and some of the mounds are a foot tall. - Jane Schwartz Answer: A foot tall? No, no, no. Why do we mulch around trees? The most important thing is to conserve moisture. Next is protection of the trunk from lawn mowers and string trimmers (yes, string trimmers constantly hitting the bark of a tree trunk can cause injury)

This year, like millions of other Americans, Morgan Perlman planted his first vegetable garden. Though only 12, he successfully grew enough fresh produce to keep his family well-fed for much of the summer. "It's healthier and it tastes better," says the soon-to-be seventh grader at Bala Cynwyd Middle School. Many first-time gardens in the Philadelphia area flourished this summer, despite incessant rain, the occasional groundhog attack, rogue pumpkins, monster tomatoes, and in one noteworthy case, a peculiar, fungus-like scourge called dog vomit slime mold.