MORE on MULCHES
There's a place for most of these mulches, but never rubber. Recycled rubber usually contains heavy metals and toxins which will leach into your soil where they'll remain (practically) forever...except for what's taken up by your vegetables, so there's that. It's also the most flammable of all mulches and the hardest to extinguish.
Now, about your rubber soaker hose....
Let's keep the used rubber centralized in piles of tires until a better way appears to dispose of them, not hopelessly spread out across every zip code, locked in the soil.
Back to mulches...landscape weed fabric is effective at blocking weeds. However, it also blocks gas exchange and water. This shuts down the soil microbes, killing roots.
"But weed fabric has all those holes in it; and the marketing swears it lets
air & water through!"
What you and I buy is rarely "the good stuff". It lets very little water or air through, even at the beginning. After a year, it's become clogged up such that air and water aren't getting through. Microbiota, worms and roots are dying.
Quality, low-ounce landscape fabric lets a lot of water through. However, if there's any clay or loam or organic material in your soil the fabric quickly clogs up.
French drains work well for a year. At two or three years you notice it's not working well. Water is pooling again. After three or four years you wonder why you spent that time or money putting it in. It's why scads of retaining walls fail. It becomes in effect a concrete retaining wall with no drainage: l-e-a-nnnn...c-r-a-c-k, FAIL.
Meanwhile, both high & low-quality fabrics catch every mote of dust and debris, which quickly become a magnificent (...ly protected against competition) soil medium for newly deposited weed seeds.
Insult to injury, years later when you're trying to remove the dead plant or bush or small tree that's surrounded by plastic or weed cloth, roots from aggressive invasives or from a few large ornamentals which managed to get a few roots through make for intolerable work to remove the weed fabric, much less without damaging the root systems of those few ornamentals.
That said, fabric is probably great for annuals or veggies, presuming you remove it after every season and rinse it off really well.
I personally use fabric (occasionally) for gravel or rock features (rock), so the rock doesn't "melt" into the soil underneath; and to better facilitate removing the rock later so I can separate and remove the built up mud.
Paper products are now made expressly to last a long time, even when wet. When I was young, back when the earth was still cooling, if you didn't immediately get them out of the rain newspaper and cardboard melted. Now they're filled with 'coatings' to resist melting. Your paper product mulch won't "naturally decompose into carbon for the food web" for a year, give or take. Meanwhile, no air or water is getting through.
So what?
Then let's move on to, cardboard is expressly designed to limit air passage. Any paper product, when it gets wet, seals out the air. Easy enough to visualize and bad enough to not use them, but what about water? Until it's decomposed (a year +/-) it's only going to let a tiny wick of water through. Most of it pools until it evaporates, unless it runs off first.
"But, the worms! The worms l-o-v-e my lasagne mulch!"
Worms leave dry, inactive (dead) soils because they need moist soil to take in oxygen. Eventually, after you lay down your paper product mulch there's scant water or oxygen in the soil, so the worms come up...above your layer of paper product mulch, where there's moisture and oxygen.
Fun fact. Contrary to what we're all taught, it's now thought that earthworms do not come above ground in the rain because they are oxygen-starved. It's thought that they come up in order to travel faster.
Back to paper products, I read we don't have to be worried about the glues and that provided you're using something that doesn't have glossy images then the inks are not a big concern.
However, the tape and labels commonly found on cardboard are not so much very good.
Let's "Nancy Reagan" rubber, weed cloth and paper-product mulches.
"Just say, 'no'."
Fine bark mulch is sadly very popular. So popular, that it's hard to find bulky bark mulches, in bulk. Most is found in grades of 'fine'.
Bark doesn't break down for a l-o-n-g time. That's a plus, of course, except that's not great for fine bark mulch, since it not only doesn't feed the soil, but it's a g-r-e-a-t soil medium. When a seed lands on top of that fine mulch you "just add water" and that weed germinates and thrives. The university horticulturalologists have a term for how many seeds are deposited each year. "Way damn too many."
Speaking of water, these fine mulches tend to 'pancake' when they first get wet. They form a layer of....something vaguely similar to paper mache. When that "paper mache" dries it greatly reduces gas exchange. Remember gas exchange with plastic and paper product mulches? No goodly. Worse still, the next time you water much of that water runs off. What little does soak into the fine mulch won't go into the soil unless the fine mulch becomes super-saturated, which takes a lot. Any water left in the fine mulch after the rain stops won't enter the soil. It will evaporate.
Let's Nancy Reagan fine mulches, too. Let's also curse real estate agents, home-owner associations and marketers who train homebuyers to value fine mulch.
Does anyone have the number for Winnie Sanderson?
Large bulky bark mulches are harder to find, but they leave most newly deposited seeds high and dry away from soil media and exposed to UV. Water and air both freely pass through bulky bark mulches. So far so great.
However, bark doesn't feed the soil.
Of note is that when using bulky material, to prevent previously deposited weed seeds from germinating requires 4-6". Bulky mulches prevent most weeds by cutting off enough sunlight to prevent most seeds from germinating. Most people don't put down more than an inch or two, then wonder why they're pulling about as many weeds as before.
Gravel works the same way as bulky bark does; except gravel has a funny way of filling up with fine debris, which grows great weeds. Every time you pull a weed you pull earth up to mix with the gravel. It's super time consuming to refresh: dig it all up, sift and rinse then put it back down...knowing all the while that in a very few years you're going to do it again...especially if you have needle-trees nearby. Needle-trees and gravel do not mix; or rather, they mix especially well, which is the problem.
I'm not fond of bulky bark or gravel mulches, but they are much better than plastic, weed fabric, rubber or paper product mulches.
Woody mulch (aka bulky wood mulch), provided it's made from first-use wood is better than bark of any size. The problem is that much of it comes from recycled wood: pallets, crates, demolition scraps, building scraps.... Ick !
If you don't know whether the wood mulch is from first-use or recycled material you might consider passing.
Assuming it's good wood, woody much does everything bulky bark does (s'long as the woody mulch is 4-6" deep), but it can also feed the soil. "Can", in that it seems that most bulky woody mulch is in the form of cedar. Sometimes that's unprocessed, plain cedar bits, but often it's play chips ($$$), which are often cedar. Cedar takes a long time to decompose (not as long as bark) and is composed chiefly of only carbon, providing little else that your plants need.
Don't misunderstand me. Carbon is great. Some of my best friends are carbon-based.
Many people don't want wood chips near their home. They figure it attracts termites. Studies show that's not the case. Termites are attracted to fine mulches, sawdust or paper-products, though. The thought is that maybe it's impossible to build tiny, protected tunnels with bulky mulches, whereas fine mulches "pancake" and are workable for the task of building tunnels.
BTW: Moles like paper-product-based and pancaking mulches, too.
Arborist Chips make far and away (vastly) the superior mulch. It comes in second solely to water, insofar as what you can do to your soil to improve it.
Arborist chips are those chips that arborist trucks are full of; trees and bushes that were ground up whole and then flung into that large truck. Those chips are as freshly full of "all natural", "organic", "OMRI-approved" plant goodness as it can possibly get.
When it hits your ground it starts decomposing, slowly and steadily leaching all the invisible nutrients that plants need. That's in addition to doing everything bulky bark or plain wood chips do, only better.
Epic poems handed down through future eons ought to be written about arborist chip-based mulches.
...and might be except for those pesky real-estate agents and home-owner associations who don't care how the soil is doing, so long as the yard looks like something that no plant or tree every evolved to live in...ever. They trained most of the rest of us that arborist chips are ugly. As If !
Imagine if gardeners valued healthy soil and plants without spending money and time on useless and sometimes harmful 'soil amendments'.
I heard that The Beatles' song, "Imagine", originally included a verse
about how way awesome cool arborist chips are, but that the US market
considered that "too far out there, man." That's what I heard ! Pass it on!
Then the marketers of dark, fine mulch tell you "mulches reduce weeds, retain soil moisture and lah-lah-lah", but they don't. There's no law that says they can't say whatever they want to, so they do: ergo all the entirely useless and often harmful plant products for sale at your big-box store and garden nursery.
If you think that's not the case, look at the list of ingredients listed on a bag of "topsoil". There's only one source of bagged soil, that I know of, that actually includes actual "soil": Carpinito Brothers. Even Carpinito Brothers contains vastly too much organic bits, but...beggers and choosers.
Back to arborist chips, many people are afraid of diseased chips and about black walnut tree chips that may be within arborist chips.
Regarding arborist chips with diseased chips it's not going to infect your soil. Don't ask me. Ask the soilologists and plantologists. That's what they tested and that's what they found.
It's sounding like all the stuff we hear about black walnut trees preventing other plants from growing may not be supported by science. It seems it's certainly not the juglone, if it's anything. Here's a writeup from a fantastic local WSU horticulturologist about it. Insofar as mulch goes, don't worry about black walnut tree chips. It's not a problem.
[....End Rant]