Mulching miseries

[J. Lane]

Hi all, Here's my problem. I have two Chinese Elms in my yard and some of my neighbours have some too. These damned trees spread their seeds all over my yard every spring.I spend most of June on my knees scooping seeds out of my veggie garden and flower beds trying to keep the seedlings from growing( which they will, given any water and some medium to grow in). Thousands of the buggers have to be pulled all summer.I'd love to cut the trees down but can't. The issue I'm facing is that I need to mulch, but don't know with what. Bark mulch would be preferable, but the seeds would have a wonderful medium to grow in and be almost impossible to remove except as seedlings. Gravel may be ok but get too hot. The summers here get to be 40 degees celcius( somewhere around 100 farenhight). Help!

[John Bachman]

It sounds to me that any organic mulch makes your problem worse, not better.

Why can you not cut the sucker down?

John

[J. Lane]

I can't cut the beasts down because I'm renting the property. I have begged and pleaded with my landlord to take a chainsaw to them. He thinks they make great shade trees and would be too costly to remove. They're 60 or more feet high. I've even contemplated drilling holes in them and filling the holes with root rot, but the dammned things would fall on the house! As to what kills them: nothing short of root rot or dynamite!

[Chris Owens]

How about one of the synthetic mulch sheets? Or, light-colored gravel? We have that in the dog yard, and across the front of the house; it actually stays cooler than ambient. The only other thing I can recommend is diligent hand-removal of seedlings as they appear. Within wind-drift distance of our house are maples, cottonwoods, sycamores, sumacs, ashes, lindens, pines, spruces, and locusts. Every year we do several rounds of seedling-removal. If you get them early enough, you can kill them off by just riffling the mulch or lightly raking the gravel.

Chris Owens

[Betsy]

The fact is that deep mulching will make your pulling the seedlings far easier! I don't have any oak trees but my neighbors do. They also have maples. I pull several thousand sprouted acorns out of my garden each year, and several hundred maple seedlings. It's just part of living on planet earth!

[J. Lane]

Thanks for all the input people. The gravel mulch sounds like my best bet. I inherited a shopvac from a friend and will use that to get the seeds in open areas and around my perennials. It will cut my job in half. BTW Frogleg, my yard is 1/3 of an acre with 7 flower beds and a 50x30 foot veggie garden. I'm not adverse to weeding but find myself working 8 hours a day every day for three weeks trying to pick up the mess left by the trees.That's on top of regular weeding which is ongoing, of course. Come August I'm still finding the seedlings. Agriculture Canada has banned from sale and are coming close to banning the trees too. They are considered a weed tree.

[Frogleg]

I didn't mean to say they weren't a nuisance, just that with gardening, if it isn't one thing, it's another. :-) 50'x30' is a large space to keep up with, indeed. Still, if the only weeds you have are elm seedlings, you're lucky. (I doubt that's the case.) Hope you find a satisfactory solution.