Mulching & Planting

Most beds we take over have too much mulch, not too little. Somebody has spread two or three inches every April for a decade and nobody has ever taken any away. The bed now sits four inches higher than the lawn, the crown of every shrub is buried, and the edge has disappeared under the drift. Water runs off that bed instead of into it, and if it is against the house it runs toward the foundation.

Two to three inches is the number, measured from the soil up, not two to three inches added to whatever is already there. On an established bed a refresh is often an inch and sometimes less. What the bed needs in April is the old mulch broken up so it stops crusting over, weeds pulled before they seed, and enough new material to close the surface and bring the color back.

Sometimes the answer is to remove mulch. We pull it off the shrub crowns, take out the buildup until the bed sits at or slightly below the lawn again, and put a thin coat over the top. That is a harder sell than a truckload of new bark, and it is the right call more often than anyone wants to hear.

Volcano mulching is the most common thing done wrong in a landscape bed, and it is almost always done by someone trying to help. Bark is not root tissue and it is not built to sit wet. Mulch banked against a trunk holds moisture against that bark year round and the bark begins to rot. It also builds a covered run for voles and mice, who chew the base all winter where nothing can see them. A tree girdled that way does not come back.

The root problem takes longer to show and is worse. Roots grow where water and air are. A deep pile stays damp, so the tree sends roots up into the mulch instead of out into the soil, and those roots wrap the trunk and strangle it years later.

When we mulch around a tree, the root flare stays visible. That is where the trunk widens out into the roots, and it belongs above the mulch line. If it is buried when we get there, we dig it out first and then mulch. Same rule at every shrub: pull the mulch back from the stems and leave them breathing.

The edge comes first. A crisp bed line is most of what makes a property read as maintained, more than the mulch and more than the plants. We cut it with a spade into a shallow V trench, soil side vertical, so grass cannot creep in and mulch cannot spill out onto the lawn. Plastic and metal edging heaves out of the ground here after a couple of freeze and thaw winters, so unless a client wants Belgian block set properly, we cut a real edge and cut it again the following spring.

After the edge, the bed gets weeded and last year's perennial stems and winter-killed growth come out. Only then does mulch go on, thin and even, pulled back off the crowns by hand.

Timing is set by the bulbs. We want to be in before the daffodil and tulip shoots push through, usually late March into early April, which also gets ahead of weed seed germinating at the warm surface. If we are called later and the bulbs are already up, we mulch around them rather than burying six inches of new growth. Bulb foliage then stays until it yellows and falls over on its own. Cutting it green in May is why a bed of daffodils gets thinner every year.

No single mulch wins. There are tradeoffs, and the right one depends on the bed, the slope and what the client wants to look at.