Dirty landscape tricks with mulch

As I walked to my local Shopper’s Drug Mart recently to mail my son’s passport application, I noticed piles of mulch. And I smiled because there were weeds all around the piles. Aha. Here we go. This is a common dirty trick in landscaping.

Benefits of mulch

Mulching has many benefits in the landscape. It retains moisture,  moderates temperatures, prevents soil compaction, improves soil quality, enhances plant growth, controls weeds and it offers an instant great look!

I recently installed a nice layer of fir bark mulch onto compacted pathways at a large strata property in Maple Ridge. It created a nice soft pathway and it may reverse some of the soil compaction. It will also slow down water runoff since most of the pathways are sloping. It was one of those days that didn’t feel like work.

Landscape trick

This is the dirty landscape maintenance trick: cover up your weedy site with a thick layer of mulch and forget labour-intensive weeding for a while. Note, this doesn’t work with horsetail (Equisetum). Once you have horsetails growing through your soil and mulch, God help you.

Good maintenance calls for weeding before mulch application, especially the nastiest weeds that are likely to come back quickly. But this is a small mall with a small budget. I would guess. So the weeds stay.

One big problem

You will also see from the pictures that the layer of bark mulch is very thin. This is a big mistake. Yes, it saves you money on mulch but we already know from Dr. Linda Chalker-Scott’s writing that there is a glitch.

Weeds, like other plants, also benefit from organic mulches. Mainly from the increase in soil water retention. So a shallow  layer of mulch will enhance, rather than prevent weed growth.

Whoever maintains our little mall should go thicker with the mulch.