Mulch mania - get a grip!!!

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I am beginning to think that I live at Ground Zero for mulch fetishists (the mid to lower Midwest).

Every year around this time the populace launches into its major gardening activity of the year - buying mounds of mulch to spread around their trees and front yard shrubs. The object is not so much to benefit the plants or soil, but to “look nice”, prevent weeds etc. Early spring is a bad time to put down mulch in these parts (soil is wet to soggy and cold, mulching inhibits warm-up and locks in excess moisture) but they do it anyway, including at the hospital where I work (somehow they manage to obtain the stinkiest mulch in the area (it smells like a combination of raccoon sweat and rotting corpses), laying it down using a mulching machine which belches the stuff out through giant hoses).

The worst part is getting stuck in a checkout line behind a true mulch fetishist, like I did last Saturday. I was attempting to buy a couple bags of potting soil, but the middle-aged lady in front of me was agonizing over a Mulch Life Decision and peppering the inexperienced teen-aged cashier with an endless volley of questions - what’s the difference between these mulches, which hold their color, what’s the rebate on this, that and the other one, and on and on. She goes over to the Mulch Display Bin to fondle each one individually, then back to harangue the cashier once more. The beleaguered cashier runs off to find the manager (I should mention that while half-a-dozen employees were milling around this section of the garden center, only one register was open). While the manager and cashier are gesticulating at each other at a distance, Mulch Fetishist Lady turns to me and says “Do you have any experience with this mulch?”

“Lady, it’s just Fucking Mulch fer crying out loud! It’ll disintegrate in a few months, the woodchucks will shit all over it, what the hell do you care? Just buy some goddamned mulch and get out of my way!!”

Alright, I just thought that. Eventually the manager comes over and gets into an even more involved discussion with Mulch Fetishist Lady. Before I am irretrievably tempted into violence, another register opens up, and I move my cart there - behind an elderly man on oxygen who is slooowly debating a bagged soil purchase with two employees behind the counter. He cannot be rushed, unless I want to risk the need for CPR.

Eventually, as spring turns into summer, the conversation drags to a close (without the old guy actually buying anything) and I am able to purchase my bags of soil. “Do you want a separate receipt so you can apply for the rebate?” “Jesus NO, just gimme the dirt!!!”

A colleague of mine (who lives in a ritzier neighborhood than I do) tells me that neighbors have approached him to try to get him to agree to buy the same style and color of mulch as they do, to achieve front yard uniformity.

I tell you, mulch mania is a sickness, only exceeded by lava rock enthusiasts.

2

I put that right up there with lawn fetishists. My personal philosophy is that green + uniform trimmed height = lawn. Grass, clover, crabgrass, miscellaneous weeds - as long as there are no stickers, I’m good. Half of my back yard is moss, and I think that’s great - it stays green and low! :smiley:

I will confess to using mulch in my flowerbed to try to control the weeds, but the trees are on their own, as are the hedges and the assorted evergreens around the front of the house. And the mulch I’m using is what’s left of a tree we had removed last month - the stump was ground into mulchy deliciousness!

3

I mulch. I will not be doing it yet (probably in a couple of months). I use it mostly for decorative purposes but it does help to keep the weeds out.

I use cocoa bean casings. They smell WONDERFUL. Chocolately goodness!

(Mind you, I only buy one bag and know what I am getting so I am quick through the checkout.)

4

You must have interesting habits if you recognize those smells. Rotting corpses I can maybe understand, but raccoon sweat?:eek:

:smiley:

5

I spent a summer in college working as a groundskeeper and became intimately familiar with the scent of mulch. I’ll agree on the rotting corpses (like, sickly sweet), with an undercurrent of mouse shit (gotta love that fecal tang).

Anyway, I know it’s not a pleasant smell, but it’s still an evocative one, for me. When they start the annual re-mulching at work, the smell takes me right back to my college days. I really liked that job, so it’s a nice memory. :slight_smile: Bring on the mulch!

6

I usually think of mulch as the rotting stuff you want to turn into the soil. The decorative stuff I would refer to as pine bark or something else descriptive of it’s origin. I am tempted to cover my whole lawn with the stuff and stop mowing. But other than that extreme I’m not really into. To some extent that’s because some of my neighbors spend a lot of time and money on maintaining a golf course instead of a lawn. Yet my lawn is very healthy because I mow infrequently and don’t rake out the clippings. The grass grows thick, faster than I want, in sun or shade, and even in spots that get waterlogged in the spring rain. I don’t know if there’s proof out there somewhere, but I’m pretty sure raking up the grass clippings is just taking nutrients out of the soil, and the worst thing to do to a lawn.

7

The lawn fetishists would hate me - I’m actively sowing clover seeds in my lawn. Clover good; monoculture grass, bad.

I’m with you, Jackmannii - it’s just freaking mulch. You put some on your beds so you don’t get too many weeds, and move on. Since I’m actively growing clover in my lawn, any neighbours with ideas about matching mulches would probably skip our house. :slight_smile:

8

I did a couple of forensic pathology rotations during residency and a few of the customers had…gone by just a bit.

Plus we have lots of wildlife hereabouts and not all of it showers regularly. :slight_smile:

9

Ugh - they were spreading some mulch on campus last week that smelled like Vick’s Vap-O-Rub

10

Around here, the mulch fetish has two distinct camps: Pine straw (long pine needles) or red-dyed bark chips.

Either way, people love to pile the stuff high around trees, creating mulch volcanos. (PDF about the dangers of excess mulch)

You know spring has arrived when nearly every gas station has a pallet of red mulch chips available for sale.

11

Mulching mower here, and my lawn is much happier since I got it (I didn’t bag previously). I don’t remember ever putting anything on the lawn in the 19 years we’ve been here, and the weeds aren’t totally out of control (I’m also a believer in FairyChatMom’s philosophy - “it all looks good once it’s mowed”)

A guy who runs a lawn service once told me he loves his customers who bag, since they are gathering up and discarding all of the fertilizer he is putting down, so he gets to charge them again (and again).

12

My favorite local post-hippie bakery (they use compostable tableware, buy local organic eggs, etc.) uses some kind of über-mulch on the landscaping in front that smells fantastic. Presumably shredded cedar bark. I always find myself thinking about perfume after I pick up a cake or a breakfast roll there – I was potty for perfumes for a while, a while back, after reading The Emperor of Scent – Iso E Super is one of my favorite things… So you should tell your fetishist HOA types they’re using the wrong stuff; if they were using the good mulch, everyone would think your neighborhoods were, like, posh designer enclaves.

13

I mulch - and it does keep the weeds down. Our back “yard” is only about eight feet wide and ends at a ravine. It gets almost no sun, and grass won’t go. I tried ground covers, and they never took off, so it’s mulch and hostas.

I like brown and cheap. We have dogs, so I skip the cocoa bark. I go for cheap pine nuggets, and I hate the dyed red stuff.

By the time I’m in line, I know what I want and how many bags. It’s the poor cashier who isn’t sure about the differences in the 40 kinds of mulch offered, even when I tell them the name and the price.

14

The absolute King of Mulches around here, coveted by fetishists above all others is Absolute Black Mulch (I believe the price quoted in the link is for 300 pounds of the stuff, not a single bag).

Black mulch - fabulous! - unless you spread it up against the house in full sun, in which case it’ll absorb so much heat you might have to crank up the air conditioner a couple of notches.

15

I had 36 yards of single grind mulch delivered two weeks ago. I have an unmowable hill in the back that I’ve been slowly pulling the woods on to.

Let me tell you: That is a shitload of mulch to move by hand.

16

After working as a landscaper through much of my college career I am not a huge fan of bark mulch either. I do like cocoa bean shell mulch though and tried using it in the back one year. Unfortunately it developed a mold problem that I didn’t like and am currently looking for a better choice.

17

The “rotting stuff” is compost, not mulch. Although, mulch will eventually turn into compost. Circle of life and all. :wink:

18

So what is the red dye in that red-dyed mulch? There is some in the front of the house I just bought and I am not real keen on it. Can I compost it?

19

Just put regular mulch on top of it, and let it decompose. Shoveling it up to take it to a compost heap would be too much of a pain.

20

Ain’t that the truth. I had 20 yards delivered just today. It looks like about 1/2 a dump truck load.
My Good Friday is going to be anything but Good.