Using mulch can save water

Mulch is a very simple solution to saving water in your everyday life. We are Kylie Tucker and Gavin Smith from Perkins County Spartabots team, sharing an awareness about ways to save water. 

Spartabots is a local robotics team that deals with different problems and solutions for our world through the use of robots and problem solving skills. It teaches kids to think like scientists and engineers while being active in our communities. Spartabots is named after our junior high mascot, the Spartans. This year we are focusing on hydrodynamics, so we are finding problems that deal with water usage. 

One of the many problems we chose is that several people use too much water to water their plants, lawns and gardens. We have focused more on the plant side of this big issue. Water usage has been an issue in our community, so we decided to pursue this problem and find ways to save water. 

There are many different types of mulch but they all can save water in some way. Using mulch can save plenty of water in our community. 

We conducted an experiment to see which mulch held water the best, therefore saving the most water. We used four different types of mulch as factors in our experiment. We used recycled and shredded paper, cardboard pieces, wood shavings and a mixture of all of them. 

In our experiment we took sweet potato plants and planted them in pots with soil. Then we put the mulch around the plants and watered them. We watered them every other day for a month. The plants with just the shredded paper, just cardboard pieces, and just wood shavings didn’t hold water as well as the mixture. They also didn’t look well. Diversity with different mulches works the best because you get the benefits of each mulch. In conclusion, we found that the plants with the mixture of the mulches worked the best.

There are several other things you can use for mulch. One is grass clippings. When you mow your lawn you could use the grass clippings as a simple mulch. Grass clippings are also very good when mixed with two times as much dried leaf litter. Mixing these will create a compost with very high nutrients. This ratio will also avoid issues such as smells and mold. 

Some other options for mulch are newspapers, hay or straw. These mulches are very effective at holding water, are easy to get, and reduce weeds from growing. 

Mulch is a very simple and easy solution to saving water in your everyday life. After our experiment, we found that a mixture of cardboard, shredded paper and wood shavings worked the best. This is a great mixture of mulch and we would like you, the citizens of Perkins County, to try this or even other mulches. We just want what is best for the community and its water usage. We hope that after reading this editorial, you would try and use mulch for all of your plants and gardens. It can truly make a difference!

We would like to thank Doug Babbit and Strahinja Stepanovic! They gave us advice and useful information for this project.