There is (almost) no way around mulching. Covering the soil with a protective layer makes sense for many reasons. Because a layer of mulch can contain weed growth, so you save yourself a few weeding passes during the season. Fully covered, the soil is also unlikely to crust over. This also means you'll have to hoe less often. And it's not only beneficial in dry summers: a mulch layer noticeably curbs moisture loss through evaporation. In addition, your plants benefit from a higher soil temperature under the mulch layer, which means they thrive in less time and set fruit soon. However, if you would like to avoid using plastic mulch film, there are not many (natural) materials that can be used as mulch, especially in vegetable beds. Bark mulch fixes nitrogen, so it requires increased fertilizer applications and often tends to rot or fungus prematurely. Lawn clippings and nettle leaves are ideal, but not always available in sufficient quantities in the garden. This is where our mulching paper made from renewable resources comes into play.

The mulch paper is made from grass, grass plant silage, corn and grain flour. Our supplier in Lower Saxony uses a patented manufacturing process for this purpose, in which the aforementioned components are processed - in other words, fermented - into so-called fermentation products in the company's own biogas plant within 150 days. Hence the name "fermentation product fibers". So, strictly speaking, our mulch paper is a waste product, because only what the biogas plant leaves behind in fermentation residues after the energy production that is running anyway is used for production.

The paper itself is easy to apply. We supply it in roll form, so you can cut off pieces of the appropriate size with scissors and lay them out in the vegetable bed. To plant the covered bed, slit the paper crosswise and you can then set your plants in the soil through the openings created. Just remember to either weigh down the corners with rocks or dig them into the soil so you don't lose the mulch layer at the first gust of wind. After two to three months, the paper will begin to decompose. But that doesn't matter at all, because it is completely degradable. You can either dispose of the remains in the compost or rake them under - either way, a valuable contribution to the formation of humus.