Landscaping for Love and Laughter: Designs and Ideas

Mulch in your yard is beneficial in many ways. It protects the soil, provides nutrients to plants, and keeps down weed growth. Here are some recommendations for you to install mulch in your yard for a beneficial and beautiful landscape.

Choose the Mulch Type

There are many types of mulch materials for your landscape and garden areas. No matter the type of mulch, you can improve the appearance of your landscaped areas, protect the soil against erosion and dehydration from the sun's heat, and improve the condition of and nutrients in the soil. If you choose a mulch made of wood chips, bark, straw, or similar organic material, the material will decompose over time as it sits on the soil. And this will put nutrients back into the soil to enrich the soil and its ability to grow healthy, beautiful vegetation.

However, no matter the type of mulch you choose, you should order it from a local supplier for fast and convenient delivery. Or if you have the mulch materials available on your own property, you can use the methods of composting along with using available materials for material recycling. For example, if you cut your lawn each week, lawn trimmings will provide you with a beneficial mulch material. Just be sure you spread it thinly as you layer it on so the lawn clippings can dry out. Wet lawn clippings will stick together and create a shell over the soil and can block out moisture. Or you can use pine straw from your trees, chip up wood bark from fallen limbs, or use mulched leaves in the fall season for a good winter mulch covering.

Prepare Your Area

When you are planning to lay mulch to improve an area, you should look at the site and its edges to make sure it has a uniform appearance. Your mulched bedding areas need to be smoothed over with a rake to remove any bumps and large debris. Then you should lift out any large rocks that will get in the way of your landscaping. The edges of the bedding area should be trimmed and neat in appearance so you don't have scraggly lawn creeping into your bedding area.

Many times a mulched area will be surrounded by lawn, which needs to be trimmed back. However, you can install an edging material to keep both your lawn and the mulch in their respective places. You can add in vinyl or metal edging that you insert into the soil at the edge of your bedding areas. A portion of the edging should protrude from the soil to keep this barrier in place to control movement of your mulch. If you want to install edging bricks, stones, or concrete curbing, these materials will provide more durable protection as the barrier.

Contact a company that sells landscape mulch to learn more.