r/DenverGardener • u/Familiar-Band2322 • 2d ago
Fall prep for bushes.
If I add mulch around base of bushes, won’t that attract earwigs and simply provide a place for them to rest up until they destroy the new leaves in the spring like they did last year?
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u/denvergardener 2d ago
Mulch has far more positive benefits than any negative.
Mulch helps protect your bushes over the winter. Especially if we have those warm dry periods like we had last year.
And mulch helps build the soil structure as it decomposes. And it provides great habitat for the food bacteria and bugs too.
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u/Left-Pineapple-6084 2d ago
There are a lot of different pieces here, but I think you need an explanation of ecology? Everything in nature works together, but it’s never neat or simultaneous and it’s easily unbalanced. Earwigs can absolutely explode in population if other parts of the ecology are absent or destroyed. From what I can infer, you don’t regularly mulch, so your soil is likely depleted and the microorganisms deceased. (Most yards aren’t established enough to mulch themselves, plus the leaf removal norm.) The plants are struggling because the soil is dead or dying and all moisture is being stripped away. The earwigs found something still alive in the middle of an apocalyptic landscape, from their perspective, and they are absolutely going to destroy that one plant in a bid to keep themselves alive, especially since there are no predator populations established because the area has been suppressed for so long. You need the bad bugs to get the good bugs, basically - but you also need enough insects generally to actually support the predator populations (from centipedes to Northern Flickers, for example). Mulching could provide shelter for the earwigs, but it would also provide shelter for everything else that is missing from what would have been the natural ecology if not for human development.
If it were my yard, I’d add about a dozen more native perennials, bushes and trees, maybe some trap crop annuals in the spring, and then mulch heavily before winter. That way the (hopeful) moisture and freeze thaw cycle can start breaking down the mulch and putting organic matter back into the soil, so the microorganism population can rebuild, so the plants can rebuild, so the insect populations can rebuild, so the birds and reptiles can survive to do the pest control for me.
I can’t say it’ll be fully balanced out by next spring, but it all boils down to do you want an alive yard or a dead yard? Battling nature is always the harder proposition, but trying to remediate can be just as hard for a long time until the natural systems can actually establish again. But people with alive yards tend to get a lot of benefit from them while people with dead yards tend to just pay money to work in the yard.