Top Dressing with Rice Hulls with Wonderland Nursery

Wonderland Nursery took the time to explain to us why they always have rice hulls at the tops of their plants.

Why Rice Hulls?

Nokona Jodrey:

If you don’t use it, I recommend it. It’s amazing. What it does for overall water retention in the summer for outside stuff, like the reflection off the hulls, makes a difference. Then primarily, what it does to keep your top organisms alive, like mycelial mats. So, just by nature, all living things have water with them but the microbes themselves can hold on to it even in times when it would evaporate from overall soil temperature. If you can use rice hulls to keep that top life alive, you just seem to have a more resilient, drought tolerant plant.

After filling the top of the pot with rice hulls, Nokona spoke about how much to use.

There’s approximately a half inch of rice hulls on the top. When you water it, it’s going to want to shift around a little bit, too. So, if you have enough of it, it keeps it pack rather than letting it churn into the soil. It creates a real mat.

Kevin Jodrey:

In this case, the mulch is just rice hulls. The reason we use that, is that it’s just really easy to put inside the pots. The mulch just helps the top layer of this media remain cool and damp so that the microbial life flourishes a little better. This is all biologically active media and when you copy outside leaf deposition, it makes a big difference.