Post #3957742

2026-07-20 10:19 UTC

I had a raised bed at my parents' and their home was picked to be on a drought-tolerant neighborhood garden tour. What they got the most questions on was my wine cork mulch. I wanted to reduce the risk of getting polyphagous shothole borer from free mulch (trees could look like they'd died of drought when they'd actually died of a PSB infestation) and the local reuse places had some wine corks, which would not have that risk. #Gardening #Bloomscrolling

Replies (3)

@BibbleCo@infosec.exchange 2026-07-20 10:54

@ml@ecoevo.social woah, what a profligate, uh,.. "use" of corks! I drill small holes in mine and use them as eye protection guards on those thin 400mm canes, but it took me several years to accumulate my hoard. The plastic ones used to be easier to spot & weed out but now they're moulding fake textures and speckled colour variations to make them harder to skim. I once had a mad idea of developing cane topper corks as a commercial product, & bribed the bar staff at my local pub to hang a carrier bag up behind the bar for their used corks. But you know how it goes, "half a page of scribbled lines" etc.

Open ##3957741
@ml@ecoevo.social 2026-07-20 10:22

If you have a source of wine/lambic/sparkling juice corks, this can be a decent source of mulch with less disease risk. You can make mulch safe from many things by solarizing it for 90 days, but I was fairly certain the local sources of free mulch from downed trees weren't doing that. The corks *do* float so you wouldn't want to use it anywhere flat it rains a lot. Inside a raised bed, there were edges that would keep them inside. #Gardening

Open ##3961757
@MCDuncanLab@mstdn.social 2026-07-20 13:02

@ml@ecoevo.social We once used cork as mulch for a container, they seemed to poison the soil. Nothing grew in that container, but maybe it was something else.

Open ##4289097