
Mulch Ideas for This Coming Spring
Spring is a busy time for gardeners and the perfect season for landscaping. Landscapers and gardeners are busy picking up their gardening supplies and landscaping supplies. Mulching can ensure you get the most out of your landscaping project. Mulch provides plants with extra nutrients and helps retain a healthy level of nutrients in the soil. It also helps maintain moisture, prevents soil erosion, controls weeds, and acts as an effective pest controller. Here are some mulch ideas to incorporate into your landscaping plans this spring.
Create borders
Clean, well-defined borders are an essential part of landscaping. Mulch makes excellent borders for edging rock gardens, water features, and hedges and for creating a border around the home.
Dark mulch offers a fantastic contrast to rocks and plants. FSI Landscape Supply’s Black Mulch is a deep black 100% natural wood fibre mulch double-dyed with an organic colourant for an extra rich and contrasting colour.
To create a mulch border:
- Use a spade to draw a border into the soil.
- Deepen the cut to about four or six inches, removing turf from the border.
- Make the border as broad as you need it to be, and then prepare the soil by removing any weeds from the border.
- Lay down two or three inches of mulch along the border.
Combine mulch and natural stones
Mulch and stone make a fantastic pair. Try matching mulch with natural stones like beach pebbles and decorative rocks to add sophistication and vibrancy to your project. Here are some ways to pair stones with mulch:
Create a pathway of stones (for example, slate stones) through a larger patch of mulch.
White river bed pebbles look excellent against FSI Landscape Supply’s Red Mulch made with natural wood fibre. The Cedar Mulch made of all-natural Ontario white cedar bark is light brown and is fantastic to lay with darker flagstones.
Mulch and rocks are fantastic for slopes. Both can be used in combination to add a lovely bit of colour and control soil erosion. You can use a plain layer of mulch on the slope and stack flat rocks at the bottom to border the mulched area and prevent the mulch from spilling over.
For garden beds
Mulch is the magic ingredient for raised garden beds, flower gardens, and vegetable gardens, keeping away weeds and insects. Add no more than two to three inches of mulch over the soil after wetting the soil. Anything more than that becomes counterproductive and prevents water from reaching the soil.
Prevent water pooling
Organic mulch acts as a giant sponge, absorbing and holding excess water and slowly releasing it into the soil and air to prevent pooling.
To use mulch as a drainage solution, add organic mulch into the soil to a depth of about eight inches below the compacted layer. The top of the mulch must be raked into a slope so it slopes away from the ponding area. Not only does mulch add volume to the soil, but it also raises the level to discourage ponding.
Mulch is fantastic for landscaping and should be a part of every landscaper’s gardening and landscaping supplies. Not only does it help improve the soil and keep out weeds, but it is a fantastic landscaping tool that can increase a landscape’s aesthetic factor tremendously. So the next time you pick up gardening supplies or landscaping supplies, pick up a variety of mulch as well.