From drought to floods: How MULCH can help and how you can get yours.

If we haven’t already converted our lawns, we will soon, so we need to get new plants started. We understand that el Nino will bring heavy rains, so we need ways to capture that water. But soil experts explain that the drought has actually made flooding more likely by diminishing the soil’s capacity to soak up moisture

Whether Nature sends us too little or too much rain, it also provides trees to help us. When we place chipped tree-wood mulch on soil, heavy rain lands on many surfaces, which breaks its velocity and allows the rain to stay and soak in instead of racing off to the ocean. It provides water for our trees long after the rainy day and some reaches the aquifer to be pumped out and purified for the drinking water no longer available to import.

So how can we get enough of this versatile mulch to cover all our bare soil? Pasadena provides some free mulch and can learn from other cities ways to provide more. We need you to come help make that happen.

Learn from experts: Leigh Adams of the LA County Arboretum, Melanie Winter of The River Project and Water LA; Greg Jones of Long Beach Public Works and Charles Peretz of Pasadena Public Works. Moderator Sarah Leone of Hollywood food Guild will invite you to share your ideas too.

State of the Mulch 2, Tuesday, December 8 at The Shed, 1355 Lincoln Ave, Pasadena, 91103: mingle at 6:30, panel at 7:00. Presented by Mulch for the People, a project of Transition Pasadena, and by Zanja Madre.

Lin Griffith