Making mistakes during mulching can prevent your soil from obtaining benefits, including moisture conservation, weed suppression, erosion reduction, and water discharge. Landscape designers and academics offered their best advice on how to get the most out of mulch in your garden.
Mulch can be used as a decorative element.
Mulching helps keep lawns healthy, but it also looks good. Choose a colored mulch that matches the brick, stone, stucco, and siding hues outside your house.
Dark mulch contrasts nicely with flowers, enhancing your garden design. Mulch can also be used to improve the theme and setting of your landscape.
Take a Peek at Your Entire Environment
Some landscapes feature large swaths of mulch with a few bushes strewn about.
You want your landscapes to be designed so that your shrubs cover the entire soil surface and that you have a total vegetative cover. Then, to keep moisture at bay, cover them with mulch.
Make Sure You Clear It Out
Remove some of the old mulch when re-mulching a bed.
Mulch has been added to the beds more than three times on occasion, so removing part of the mulch accumulated over time is best.
Adjust the Thickness if Necessary
Thin it out as you go closer to an edge, such as a sidewalk, stepping stone, or tree trunk. There’s no reason to have a mulch pile next to a tree trunk. You want to gradually reduce the amount of time you spend on it.
Do Try Out a Different Mulch
There are a variety of textures available, starting with pine straw and shredded hardwood bark. Try cocoa bean shells (these smell wonderful too! ), nut hulls, rescued palettes that have been crushed up, and even seaweed if you’re seeking a new appearance and need to update your mulch.
Don’t Overlook Barren Soil
Mulching has been discovered to have considerable environmental benefits by researchers. Erosion and sediment runoff are both caused by bare soil on your land. Mulching can aid in erosion control. The amount of sediment lost by bare soil is about five times that of mulched soil.
Don’t Use Too Little or Too Much Mulch
Using the proper amount of mulch at the right time will help keep weeds at bay and save moisture, reducing the need to water. Three inches of mulch is recommended for beds, and mulching should be done twice a year. There is an exception if you use pea gravel mulch or inorganic mulch. Then you might be able to get away with just 2 inches. Another consideration is whether you have a herbaceous plant bed that is too tiny for 3 inches of mulch.
Remember to Take Care of Your Trees
Mulch the tree’s base to preserve the trunk, especially if it is a young tree. Mulch rings provide a protective barrier against other plants and keep mowers at bay.
Don’t Assume You Need Something Underneath
Mulches, such as organic stone mulch, can be separated from the soil using plastic or geotextiles. It is thought that black plastic will keep weeds at bay. Adding a covering of plastic or landscape fabric, on the other hand, may increase water runoff and detract from your garden’s clean, streamlined appearance.
Avoid landscape fabric if you’re using an organic mulch that will decompose, such as shredded hardwood bark, because you want the mulch to be in contact with the soil to improve it. Water and rain may be prevented from reaching the soil by plastic or landscaping fabric, which may increase drainage. Weeds may also become a part of the landscape fabric.
The plastic or landscaping fabric may show through if the mulch shifts or is replenished. It looks awful when you have plastic or landscaping fabric exposed beneath the mulch.
Use Only Good Mulch
The main stumbling block is getting mulch from an untrustworthy source. Mulch, for example, could be supplied contaminated with noxious weed seeds if it was stored near a weedy field. That could cost you a lot of money in the long run.
Mulch is very important for your garden, it reduces the number of weeds, and some of them also nourish the soil. Let us know in the comments if you have mulch in your garden…
