For all you mulch happy gardeners out there I too am a believer. I have always been a disciple of the great mulchers of America. Some would say the Facebook group of The Garden Professors is all about using arborist mulch, you know, the rowdy and stringy chipper mulch from the professional and kind of professional tree trimmers. And yes that seems to be a ongoing subject over there, but I have to admit in my experience that aborist mulch has always been a part of success in my gardening adventures. Back in the day (early 90's) when I first experienced the fruits of free arborist mulch, I was reluctant to use the mulch as it was so stringy and "dirty looking". It had masses of limbs, sticks, stumps, green trimmed foliage and other foul things I care not to mention. However, my arborist friends would deliver in truckloads for free, much to the chagrin of my two young boys who were volunteered into the world of mulch madness. Yes they even gifted me a two wheeled barrow for fathers day.
One specific load of mulch I remember fondly was from a customer who wanted her cedar firewood ground and taken away, it was the most beautiful pile of mulch I had ever seen.
Now there has been times when I have have purchased store bought mulch, mostly for garden tours or special visitors coming to the garden, but when you have a garden this size it is expensive for mulch that breaks down eventually.
Our recent spring weather has been very cool and I had some concern about the emergence of many of the plants in the native plant garden in the hell strip. This was also the first spring in a while that we left the cut down of the previous years foliage around the trimmed plants and added 3-4" of arborist mulch on top of that. But alas all the plants burst out sooner of later. There were some newly fall planted grasses that we were careful in not covering up completely. The images below show the various depths of mulch. So enjoy your mulch madness too!
Below some man-bagged cedar mulch
This image is from an area that has not received the arborist mulch yet.
The mulch wagon full of our town's recycle center free arborist mulch.
Still have the mulch wagon my boys gave me. The piece of goat panel is used to screen the larger pieces stems out which in turn go to the dog run for packing into the soil.
This is the material for the dog run.
