White Pine Shavings, Garden Helper

White pine shavings can be purchased at farm supply stores and are sold as litter and bedding for animals (rabbits, for example). The bales I get are 3 cubic feet and expand to 5.5 cubic feet. They come baled in a white plastic sheath, so if you're concerned about protecting your car, you don't have to worry about scraps littering your seat or carpet. The bales are fairly light, so they are easy to move around.


That's all that's left of my recent purchase of two bales. I add this to the compost to cover wet material -- it breaks down very nicely. I also have used it as mulch. At first I was concerned the light color would be unsightly, but I quite like how it looks. It's easy to place it gently around tender plantings, too.


Over time, the color begins to darken, of course, and as plants fill in, it becomes less and less noticeable. Next year you won't be able to see that it was used here:


It's also handy for delineating a space that has been prepared for planting something not yet acquired, performing a spaceholder function:


I keep finding new uses for it. Yesterday as I was completing a rock border around a new bed, I only had a few large rocks, but many small ones. I dug a shallow, narrow trench, put the stones in, and filled around them with white pine shavings:


When it is used as a mulch, one of its benefits is that it doesn't absorb the moisture from the soil, as the woodchips we had blown into the beds this year did. Instead, it seems to do what I want mulch to do, which is to keep the moisture in the soil, and gracefully break down, adding organic material and no weed seeds. If you decide to buy some, do make sure you get white pine, and not cedar shavings, which are also baled and sold as bedding. The cedar has allelopathic components that impede the growth of other plants, and pine does not.

I'm almost out. Time to go pick up another couple of bales.