Creating Your Own Mulch

Laying new mulch on your garden and landscape is comparable to having your car repainted; it covers flaws, is aesthetically pleasing and, when done correctly and with an exclusive product, makes old plants look new again, and new plants look better.

You can choose from natural or synthetic mulch at a nursery or home improvement store, and pay a high price for either. Or, you can create your own natural or synthetic mulch and save quite a bit of money. There are several kinds of natural—or organic—mulches you can make using:

• Sawdust, leaves, grass clippings, straw and hay, shells and hulls, and wood bark and chips
• Shredded cardboard, magazines, and newspaper
• Compost

You can also create your own synthetic mulch using:

• Old plastic garbage bags
• Used rubber tires
• Worn out garden hose

Have you ever driven through a new housing development and seen newly formed lawns strewn with hay or straw? Landscapers use hay and straw as mulch to protect new grass seed and encourage its growth. You can use your old grass clippings, leaves, coffee bean hulls, peanut shells, and chopped tree trimmings as mulch in your garden. Instead of recycling your old newspapers, junk mail, and magazines, shred or cut them and mix them with old grass clippings or dead leaves to create your own mulch.

Create a compost pile in a corner of your backyard. Compost combines carbon, oxygen, air, and nitrogen and naturally creates healthy fertilizer for your plants. In addition to yard waste such as grass clippings, dead leaves, and tree trimmings, add kitchen scraps to your compost pile. If you've food left over on your dinner plates, scrape it all into a scrap bucket and then dump it onto your compost pile. Make certain that anything you add to your compost is something that will decompose. Do not add meat or cheese products since, when they decompose, they cause foul odors and attract varmints. Make sure you do not add anything to your compost pile that will breed weeds.

Go through your neighborhood any weekend in fall and collect bagged leaves and yard trimmings set out for the recycle program. Dump them into your compost pile, then shred the bags and save them for mulching your trees along with your recycled rubber.

Creating your own mulch will not only save you money, doing so will help the environment because you are recycling synthetic products and using them to promote organic plants.