The Best Mulch for Every Task

Whether it’s the number of tasks ahead of us, the pollen in the air, or the residual subconscious feeling from our school days that something is coming to an end, it’s this time of year that our head minds tend to go in all directions at the expense of concentrating on one task, particularly when it comes to the outdoors! Luckily, no matter the property maintenance project, mulch is the tool to help. Organic mulch or inorganic mulch is the question. We used a blog from a few weeks ago to talk about how mulch helps you with your landscape maintenance every season. So today, we will make it like a gardener and dig a little deeper to teach you which mulch will work best in each area of your Augusta yard. Of course, like all landscaping, personal preference trumps the rules, but here are our best practices for how and where to use mulch!

Type of Mulch

While you can cover your garden with nearly anything and claim it’s mulch, there are some materials that are obviously better than others. But even within the accepted mulch varieties, there are still places where one works better than another. So while we could fill the following 500 words with an alphabetical list of mulching materials, there are two general categories that each of those types falls within. Those categories are organic and organic. And neither is evident as they might appear on the surface.

Organic Mulch

While today the term organic is generally associated with the health food section of your grocery store, the word has an older, more general meaning: referring to or deriving from living matter. For example, in landscaping, we use organic mulch to refer to mulch that comes from plants.

Types of Organic Mulch

Many of the most popular mulch varieties, such as tree bark and compost, are organic. Tree bark is the most common mulch for most home landscapers. It’s beautiful, natural-looking, and versatile. Within shredded tree bark, you can have many different consistencies and colors of mulch. And depending on your goals, you can choose dyed and treated or untreated tree bark. Other popular materials include shredded leaves, grass clippings, hay, and compost. Traditionally, farmers and home landscapers would mulch with whatever material was readily available in the region. That might include the shells from nuts, pine cones, corn cobs, or whatever was leftover from the primary crop. Fishing villages would even use sea shells!

Where Should You Use It?

The benefits of organic mulch are the same as the problems with it. It’s natural and breaks down. How natural you want to go will depend primarily on the purpose of your garden. Many home landscapers like to use plant-based mulch because, eventually, it will break down and feed the soil. However, if your primary goal is longevity, you may choose a different material or use a variety of plant mulch that is more treated.

Inorganic Mulch

So now that you know what organic mulch is, you probably have a decent idea of what inorganic mulch is. But again, the definition can be deceiving because inorganic doesn’t necessarily mean unnatural. There are manufactured mulches as well as other inorganic varieties.

Manufactured Mulch

Human ingenuity shows its full force when searching for all the materials we’ve adapted for mulching our gardens. For playgrounds, we used rubber made from shredded tires because of their softness on feet and elbows. In our flower beds, we use everything from polished glass and marble to plastic beads. The primary benefit of manufactured mulch and inorganic mulch, in general, is that it doesn’t break down. That makes it popular for businesses and homeowners who just want something aesthetically pleasing that they rarely need to fool with. The other positive is that we can create whatever look we need, and a quick Google search will show you that if you can dream it, someone’s done it!

Rock Mulch and Others

The other form of inorganic mulch almost seems like it could fit into the organic category. That includes rocks and shells. These materials are natural but not derived from plants and don’t decompose over time, at least not in a traditional sense. So they can give your garden a natural feel but still have the longevity of manufactured mulch.

Got Mulch?

With summer coming, you can’t put off mulching your garden beds much longer. We’ll help you find the inorganic or organic mulch you need to match your gardens and mulch forward into the summer!