Spruce Up Your Home and Yard with some Landscaping Mulch
By Mark J. Donovan
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One way to spruce up your home’s curb appeal is to spread landscape mulch around your home’s shrubbery and garden beds. Besides the clean and natural lines formed by the use of landscape mulch, bulk mulch also helps to retard weed growth. However it is important to spread bark mulch properly to prevent water and insect problems around the home.
There are many different landscaping mulch types to choose from and all of the natural bark mulch types are fairly inexpensive. Natural bark mulch types include pine bark mulch, hemlock mulch, hardwood mulch, and mulch nuggets. |
Bark mulch is typically available in various shades of black, brown and red and you can purchase it either by the cubic yard or in prepackaged bags. If you have more than 100 square feet of garden beds to mulch I would highly recommend buying landscaping mulch by the yard. Typically mulch suppliers will deliver it to your home for a minor fee, and in some cases the delivery may be free if you buy several yards or more.
| Spreading landscape mulch is fairly easy to do. Though a shovel and wheelbarrow are typically involved you can probably spread a yard of bark mulch in less than 2 hours.
When spreading landscaping mulch it is important to first prepare the shrubbery and garden beds. First cut the garden edges with a shovel to make clean lines. Besides creating clean lines, cutting the garden edges also helps to hold the landscape mulch in place. |
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Next, weed the beds thoroughly. You may also want to apply a herbicide to the shrubbery or garden bed to help deter future weed growth.
| After you have prepared the gardens for mulch, spread 2 to 4 inches of landscaping mulch into the garden or shrubbery bed. You do not want to put more than 4 inches of mulch into the garden beds, because you could prevent the plants and shrubs from receiving adequate water and oxygen. In addition, too thick of a landscape mulch layer could actually breed weeds, which is completely to the contrary on why we apply landscaping mulch.
Use a plastic rake to smooth the landscape mulch out evenly throughout the garden. |
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When spreading landscaping mulch around your home’s foundation always make sure to slope it away from your home’s foundation. If the mulch bed slopes toward your foundation you may wind up with water in your basement.
Throughout the warm weather season periodically weed the landscaped mulched beds from any errant weeds that spring up.
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Additional Landscaping Resources from Amazon.com
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