Gardening – Where You Can Get Free Mulch
If you are an avid gardener, you no doubt know the importance of mulching for growing a healthy garden. However, you may not know all your options when it comes to mulching.
There are many types of resources you can use as free mulch. These include your lawn clippings as well as prunings from your shrubberies and bushes to keep your garden healthy.
A New Use For Your Grass Clippings
People tend to remove all the extra clippings of grass left on their lawns when finished mowing. This is understandable since dying grass clippings are not exactly aesthetically pleasing.
However, rather than raking up the clippings, spread them out on your lawn to help promote its health. Mulching lawn mowers are great for this. Leaving some of the grass clipping on your lawn will help your lawn hold in the right amount of water and inhibit the growth of weeds.
Additionally, when leaving the clippings on the lawn, you won’t need to water it as much, making general lawn care (and your water bill!) much easier. You simply need to make sure your lawn is not getting overexposure to water since that will actually kill it. (Think “drowning victim.”)
You can also use excess lawn clippings to help fertilize your garden, keeping it healthy by placing a layer of grass clippings above the soil and around the plants.
The best things about grass clippings are that they are free and flexible for use, while saving your energy since you won’t need to bag it up for the trash.
Use the Branches Left From Pruning
When you prune your trees and bushes, you will likely wind up with a large pile of branches and twigs – so what do you do with those. You can – as I have done – toss them into a large pile that after a while starts to look like a hut and burn them when your local laws permit. (I often wondered what creatures took up residence in there…)
Or alternatively, rather than simply eliminating them, you might find a more productive use for your branches. Turn them into mulch for your garden.
To accomplish this, you can rent a wood chipper to create your own mulch out of the branches – though be very (very!) careful using it. You will want to wait until you have a large number of branches to make the one-day cost of renting the chipping machine worthwhile.
Creating mulch with your lawn and garden wastes is an eco-friendly means of saving money on your landscaping while improving the overall look of your lawn. It is a little more work than simply purchasing mulch from a store, but well worth the effort.
