Can I mulch pecans with walnut sawdust/chips

I am going to be working on some projects that will generate a significant amount of walnut dust. Can I use this to mulch my pecans?

What other trees would be ok with walnut dust as around them?

So with walnut sawdust you have two very separate problem.

1st is that it is sawdust, which means that it has a huge surface area so the soil microbes are going to quickly consume it and in consuming it quickly they are also going to quickly deplete the other available resources in the area that your other plants needs. To support all that cell division the microbes/fungi are going to use up all the calcium/mineral/nitrogen/amino acids/water and you plants are going to suffer. So use logs or at least woodchip that breaks down slower.


2nd is that walnut has juglone that suppresses alot of plants, luckily pecans, walnut, heartnut, shakbark-hickory, butternut, etc are all in the same juglans family. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juglandaceae

With them both being in the same family it will not affect the plant. The fig/mulberry family is also immune to said compound.

I did not know that figs and mulberry were immune to that. That is probably where it will end up. What are some things that can mitigate the nitrogen.

As far as using logs instead, I do, do that with my initial plantings. I will have this saw dust so something needs to be done with it. What are ways to mitigate the negative aspects of using saw dust?

If you've got a place where you don't want anything to grow for a while, you can pile up the walnut sawdust to compost for a year or two. SPrinkle it down to get wet initially, and then regularly pee on it (or bring out containers of pee from the house so your neighbors don't see) to make it compost. It can take a long time for sawdust to break down, though. And the juglone from it being walnut sawdust may persist for a long time, I'm not sure, so you'll probably want to use the resulting compost only on juglone-resistant plants like walnut family and mulberries.

Rebecca Norman wrote:If you've got a place where you don't want anything to grow for a while, you can pile up the walnut sawdust to compost for a year or two. SPrinkle it down to get wet initially, and then regularly pee on it (or bring out containers of pee from the house so your neighbors don't see) to make it compost. It can take a long time for sawdust to break down, though. And the juglone from it being walnut sawdust may persist for a long time, I'm not sure, so you'll probably want to use the resulting compost only on juglone-resistant plants like walnut family and mulberries.

I may try that. I may try some sort of layer technique with high nitrogen fertilizer and some dried molasses.