Mulching & Green Waste Removal Across the Southern Highlands

Autumn in the Highlands produces a genuinely serious volume

Bowral, Burradoo, Berrima and Moss Vale were planted, deliberately and over more than a century, as cold-climate exotic gardens. The pin oaks and English elms along the older streets, the liquidambars, the claret ash, the silver birch clumps, the beeches in the big Burradoo gardens, the maples that draw visitors up to Mount Gibraltar every April — all of it is beautiful, and all of it comes down in roughly six weeks. Add the annual prunings from hedges, orchard trees and shrub borders, and a modest Highlands garden generates a tonnage that a green bin was never designed to absorb.

The question worth answering is not how to get rid of it. It is which part of it should stay.

Chip it here, or cart it away

Both are legitimate. The decision comes down to the material and the garden.

Chipping on site is cheaper, because nobody pays for tipping and nobody pays for the truck time. On a property with garden beds, a driveway edge, a shelterbelt understorey or bare disturbed ground, it is also the more useful outcome. A well-mulched bed in Bundanoon or Robertson holds soil temperature through a run of frosts in a way bare soil never does, and holds moisture through the dry end of summer.

Carting away is right when the material is diseased or weedy, when there is nowhere sensible to put it, when the garden is formal enough that raw chip would look wrong, or when the volume from a large removal simply overwhelms the site. It also suits properties where a stockpile would sit in a fire-management setback.

Plenty of jobs end up doing both: the clean hardwood and deciduous chip stays, the suspect material goes.

What makes good Highlands mulch

• Mixed deciduous chip — oak, elm, liquidambar, birch and ash prunings run through a chipper, ideally with the leaf material included. Breaks down at a sensible rate and feeds the soil as it goes.
• Aged hardwood chip from eucalypt work — ribbon gum, mountain grey gum, brown barrel. Coarser, longer-lasting, excellent on paths and around natives.
• Conifer chip from shelterbelt thinning. Slow to break down and slightly acidifying at the surface, which suits rhododendrons, camellias, azaleas and blueberries — a plant palette this district takes seriously. Good on tracks and fence lines.
• Leaf litter, left where it falls under a mature specimen tree wherever the setting allows. It is the closest thing to what the tree evolved to grow in.

What should not go back on your beds

• Woody weed material. Privet, blackberry, cotoneaster and hawthorn cuttings carrying seed will re-establish in the mulch you spread. Priority weeds in New South Wales carry a general biosecurity duty under the Biosecurity Act 2015, and Wingecarribee Shire Council publishes current weed management and biosecurity guidance for the shire — worth checking what is listed locally before you compost anything.
• Anything off a visibly diseased tree. Fungal fruiting bodies at the base, cankered cypress, dieback of unknown cause. Do not distribute the problem across the rest of the garden.
• Elm material where leaf beetle is active. Elm leaf beetle is well established in cool-climate parts of south-eastern Australia, and it overwinters in bark and leaf litter. If your elms are affected, get the litter and prunings off site rather than mulched under the tree.
• Very fine green matter in a thick layer. Fresh grass and soft leaf compacted 200mm deep goes anaerobic and sours. Green material needs to be mixed through coarser chip.

Where it goes when it leaves

Council operates the Resource Recovery Centre at 177 Berrima Road, Moss Vale, which takes green waste and sells recycled products including mulch back to the public. Published hours are Monday to Saturday 7.00am to 4.00pm and Sunday 7.30am to 1.00pm, closed public holidays, with a fees and charges schedule published each year (Wingecarribee Shire Council). Council also provides a green-lidded garden waste bin for grass clippings, small branches, twigs, leaves and prunings — useful for ongoing garden maintenance, hopeless for a tree job.

Confirm hours and fees on 02 4868 0888 before making a trip. A quote from any crew should show disposal as a visible line item; if it does not appear at all, ask where the material is actually going.

Putting mulch down properly

More gardens are damaged by badly applied mulch than by no mulch.

• 75 to 100 millimetres deep. Deeper is not better; it sheds water rather than holding it.
• Keep it off the trunk. A volcano of mulch heaped against the collar holds moisture against bark that is not built for it and invites collar rot. Leave a clear ring of 100mm or so around every stem.
• Out to the drip line where you can, rather than a tidy circle a metre across. That is where the feeder roots are.
• Do not dig it in. Surface mulch is a blanket, not a soil amendment.
• Top up rather than replace. Rake the old layer over, add to it, and let the decomposed material at the base do its job.

The jobs this usually follows

Most mulching work arrives attached to something else — the annual tree pruning and deciduous care round, an autumn cut on formal hedge and topiary trimming, or the grindings left after stump grinding, which are a different material again and are better used as a soil-filling backfill than as a mulch. It can also be booked on its own where a stockpile has been sitting for a season and nobody has moved it.

Ask any crew you engage to show a current public liability certificate of currency before they start. We ask the crews we work with to carry cover, and you should confirm it yourself on the day.

We cover Bowral, Mittagong, Moss Vale, Berrima and Burradoo through to Bundanoon, Exeter, Robertson and the smaller villages — see towns we serve, or start again from the home page.

Call (02) 4214 4160 to have chipping, mulch supply or a green waste clear-out quoted as a line item you can actually see.