Mulch in the context of Manure

Bark is the outermost layer of stems and roots of woody plants. Plants with bark include trees, woody vines, and shrubs. Bark refers to all the tissues outside the vascular cambium and is a nontechnical term. It overlays the wood and consists of the inner bark and the outer bark. The inner bark, which in older stems is living tissue, includes the innermost layer of the periderm. The outer bark on older stems includes the dead tissue on the surface of the stems, along with parts of the outermost periderm and all the tissues on the outer side of the periderm. The outer bark on trees which lies external to the living periderm is also called the rhytidome.

Products derived from bark include bark shingle siding and wall coverings, spices, and other flavorings, tanbark for tannin, resin, latex, medicines, poisons, various hallucinogenic chemicals, and cork. Bark has been used to make cloth, canoes, and ropes and used as a surface for paintings and map making. A number of plants are also grown for their attractive or interesting bark colorations and surface textures or their bark is used as landscape mulch.

Woodchips are small- to medium-sized pieces of wood formed by cutting or chipping larger pieces of wood such as trees, branches, logging residues, stumps, roots, and wood waste.

Woodchips may be used as a biomass solid fuel and are raw material for producing wood pulp. They may also be used as an organic mulch in gardening, landscaping, and ecosystem restoration; in bioreactors for denitrification; and as a substrate for mushroom cultivation.

A hammer mill is a mill whose purpose is to shred or crush aggregate material into smaller pieces by the repeated blows of small hammers. These machines have numerous industrial applications, including:

• Ethanol plants (grains)
• A farm machine, which mills grain into coarse flour to be fed to livestock
• Fluff pulp defiberizing
• Fruit juice production
• Grinding used shipping pallets for mulch
• Milling grain
• Livestock, poultry, and aquatic feed production
• Sawmills, size reduction of trim scrap and planer shavings into boiler fuel or mulch

Weed control is a type of pest control, which attempts to stop or reduce growth of weeds, especially noxious weeds, with the aim of reducing their competition with desired flora and fauna including domesticated plants and livestock, and in natural settings preventing non native species competing with native species.

Weed control is important in agriculture. Methods include hand cultivation with hoes, powered cultivation with cultivators, smothering with mulch, lethal wilting with high heat, burning, and chemical control with herbicides (weed killers).

Hydroseeding (or hydraulic mulch seeding, hydro-mulching, hydraseeding) is a planting process that uses a slurry of seed and mulch. It is often used as an erosion control technique on construction sites, as an alternative to the traditional process of broadcasting or sowing dry seed.

Carbon farming is a set of agricultural methods that aim to store carbon in the soil and biomass. The technical term for this is carbon sequestration. The overall goal of carbon farming is to create a net loss of carbon from the atmosphere. This is done by increasing the rate at which carbon is sequestered into soil and plant material. The increase of biomass from roots and the soil's microbiome leads to an increase in the organic matter content of the soil. Increasing organic matter content in soils aids plant growth, improves soil water retention capacity and reduces fertilizer use. Sustainable forest management is another tool that is used in carbon farming. Carbon farming is one component of climate-smart agriculture. It is also one way to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

Agricultural methods for carbon farming include adjusting how tillage and livestock grazing is done, using organic mulch or compost, working with biochar and terra preta, and changing the crop types. Methods used in forestry include reforestation and bamboo farming. As of 2016, variants of carbon farming reached hundreds of millions of hectares globally, of the nearly 5 billion hectares (1.2×10 acres) of world farmland.

The Geastrales are an order of gasterocarpic basidiomycetes (fungi) that are related to the Gomphales. The order contains the families Geastraceae—which include the "earthstars" formerly placed in Lycoperdales or Phallales,—and also Schenellaceae, Sclerogastraceae and Sphaerobolaceae.

About 160 species are classified in this order, divided among seven or eight genera, including Geastrum, Myriostoma and Sphaerobolus. Sphaerobolus species are known as "shotgun fungus" or "cannonball fungus". They colonize wood-based mulches and may throw black, sticky, spore-containing globs onto nearby surfaces.

In agriculture, gardening, and landscaping, barkdust (also bark dust, bark chips, bark mulch, beauty bark, tanbark, tan bark, or simply bark) is a form of mulch produced out of chipped or shredded tree bark. Coarser forms of barkdust may be known as bark nuggets. Trees typically used in the production of barkdust include the Douglas fir and the western hemlock.

A tropical garden is a type of garden that features tropical plants and requires heavy rainfall or a decent irrigation or sprinkler system for watering. These gardens typically need fertilizer and heavy mulching.

Tropical gardens are no longer exclusive to tropical areas. Many gardeners in cooler climates are adopting the tropical garden design, which is possible through the selection of hardier tropical plants which can survive subtropical or even temperate climates, or through the use of a greenhouse. Main features include plants with very large leaves, vegetation that builds in height towards the back of the garden, creating a dense garden. Large plants and small trees hang over the garden, leaving sunlight to hit the ground directly.