Dear America,
Please knock it off with the dyed red mulch.
No more three-foot mountains against your tree trunks.
No more piles in your flower beds.
Dyed red mulch makes your property look like the floor of a slaughterhouse.
Your friend,
MercyStreet
To me it looks like that red stuff they used to use in my elementary school to clean up the vomit.
Do you mean red as in crimsony fake red, or red as in the color of cedar shavings? Do you have a picture you could link? I haven’t seen anything but cedary colored mulches around here, and not much of that. 
Here’s a link. Scroll to bottom of page to see it on the ground.
:eek: Sheesh, I certainly wouldn’t use it. It looks far too fake. I wouldn’t want my mulch to compete with my flowers for attention like that. I can see the use of cedar mulches for certain types of plants, but color enhanced mulches, and not even from one kind of tree? All I can say is, you have to be some kind of super snob (IMO) to use that. At least, with the information I have right now, as far as the site’s description of the mulch that’s how it seems to me.
This is a new low.
Y’all must live in some pretty marginal neighborhoods.
::Ducks tomato::
OK, OK, sorry. But I see it all over the place where I live, and as for mulch volcanoes, as we call 'em around these parts, I can’t figure out what idiot thinks it even looks nice. Stupidest thing I ever saw, and enormously bad for the trees it’s done to too.
Me, I have weeds. Lots and lots of weeds.
I agree.
I’m not going to knock anybody for mulching, even to excess, because it’s good for your plants. But the dyed stuff just looks stupid. It’s landscaping – plants – it’s supposed to look at least somewhat natural. The vermillion woodchip carpet under your impatiens is just wrong, dammit.
Is the heavily dyed mulch a new thing? This is the first year I’ve noticed it around here.
[slight hijack, but still mulch related]
Mrs. West and I have had a big time lately making fun of one of our neighbors. He’s a tad compulsive and has mulched everything in his yard – including the stop sign by the side of the road. I mean, please, dude!
As I look out my back window, through the grove, across a hay field, a fence-line tree-line and another field I see not three quarters of a mile away three great piles of mulched shipping palettes. One is white (just chipped up palettes), one is a sort of turquoise green color and the third is a God awful pinkie-red to lavender color. I know the people who own the place. They are good people. They are shipping semi-trailer loads of the stuff all over the country. Good for them but, damn, that red wood mulch is ugly. I can get a pick-up load of the white stuff for $10.00 if I drive over there.
In reference to the OP, it is a bad idea to pile up more than a few inches of mulch against your trees (“mulch volcanoes”). In wet weather it promotes rot, nasty little creatures can shelter in the mulch to chew on the trunks of young trees, and deep mulch piles encourage trees to send out shallow roots which can girdle the trunk and kill the tree.
Mulch steals nitrogen. You need sufficient mulch to prevent weeds and reduce watering, but when set in excess you need more water to penetrate the mulch and you can add so much that the area becomes nitrogen depleted. And 90% of homeowners solve nitrogen deficiency by adding cheapo urea based fertilizers (instead of natural ferts) that are risky for the environment (esp water sheds).
There are a variety of black and brown muleches that when used in 3-4" depths do a good job of preventing weeds and watering.
The red crap is a joke. If it is supposed to imitate cedar, that’s another joke because cedar is rot, disease and insect resistant.
(Where’s the thread on jackasses who water everyday, even after three inches of rain?)
Heh. Like my neighbor? And it’s not like he has an auotmatic sprinkler system. He’s out there dragging his hose-end sprinkler around, even after rain.
I do not like red mulch. I saw it in someone’s yard, and on closer inspection I realized it was ground up construction debris that was sprayed red. There they were, little pieces of ground up counter top, 2x4s, etc. I suppose you can look at it as a form of recycling, but even the bark mulch dyed red looks tacky.
Hello, my name is swampbear and I use designer mulch. I have some of the red stuff around shrubbery in my front yard. I don’t do the mulch volcanoes, because as others have pointed out, a little mulch goes a long way. What I have looks good spread around the green shrubbery. I’ll agree though that even a little bit looks bad in flower beds, like it’s competing with the flowers for color.
AugustWest we’ll see who has the last laugh when your neighbor’s stop sign is all big and strong and yours is all puny and wimpy looking. 
“Designer Mulch” I guess after people scooped up designer water at upwards of two dollars, it was only a matter of time before we approached designer mulch/dirt.
You know, I wonder. If this fakey red stuff has become (shudder) generally acceptable, what’s next? Blue mulch? Purple? Pastels?
Hee hee. “Designer Dirt” … naw. It’ll never happen, right?
Additional mulch ranting: Why (especially here, in the World Capital Of Mulch Obsession), do so many people lay down festering piles of the stuff practically as soon as the snow melts? To make sure the mud doesn’t dry? To keep the soil nice and cold so nothing grows?
And what is it that makes the stuff smell like a mass extinction at the sewage treatment plant? Maybe it gets piled so high at the Mulch Works that anaerobic metabolism takes over, thus the overpowering reek (especially appetizing outside restaurants).
I am moved to respond to this thread.
Not by its subject matter, but that its title is an intriguingly few letters short of a pangram.
Oh, yeah? You know who else didn’t like red mulch? THE TALIBAN, that’s who! Proven fact: People who use red mulch experience longer, more intense and more frequent orgasms. Buy some today, piss off Al Qaeda, and experience life like never before!
I should probably mention that I work for a company that makes the red stuff they dye mulch with.
Followed by some enterprising and creative types laying down your favorite design in your front yard.
Actually, the subversive in me kind of likes that idea. I wonder how many HOA’s would need to rewrite their CC&R’s to forestall such a possibility.