Wood Mulch
Is Wood Mulch For You?
If you’re looking for a good way to enhance the appearance and health of your garden or lawn, you might want to consider purchasing an appropriate wood mulch. Wood mulches are one way to give your lawn or garden that organized professional appearance that you see in office exteriors and other similar areas. Furthermore, wood mulches can also help your plants to grow.
Benefits of Wood Mulches
There are several benefits of using wood mulch. First, their slow decay makes them an excellent slow delivering nutrient. Second, wood mulches have a very pleasant aesthetic appeal to them. Companies and those who have a penchant for doing it themselves make wood mulches from chipped pieces of felled trees. Wood mulches thus make for a good ground covering someone with an eye for landscaping can easily shape to meet the aesthetic standards of any plant area.
Third, a gardener can use wood mulch to help the plants in a garden area get through their problem seasons. For example, if the area where plants are growing tends to get too much summer sun and dry out, a caretaker can lay a wood mulch covering at the end of spring, when soil temperatures have risen to moderate levels but while the soil moisture is still high enough where the plants receive enough nutrition to survive. The mulch helps to retain the moisture by shielding the soil against the worst of the summer sun.
On the other hand, a caretaker can use wood mulches for the opposite effect as well. If your plants don’t do as well in the cold of winter, wood mulches can delay soil temperature drops. (Although we should note that mulch is less effective at this later process than at retaining moisture.)
Mulch also works naturally to retain moisture after heavy rains since the wood chips absorb rain like sponges.
Drawbacks of Wood Mulches
There are negative effects to wood mulch as well, however. First, wood mulches can keep the soil from getting proper watering if rains are brief or if not properly watered, since the wood chips absorb so much water themselves.
Second, wood mulch will sometimes carry termites that can infect your property and the structures on it if you are not careful. For this reason, you should lay your mulch at a distance from your home’s structured since termites could begin to infest the mulch and await their chances to beginning eating the wood rafters that keep your attic from crashing down on you.
Many also consider mulch a bit of a fire hazard since it adds a great deal of extra food to feed flames.
Dyed Wood Mulches
Another thing that makes wood mulch a popular choice with lawn and garden caretakers is that some wood mulch producers can dye the chips of the mulch to virtually any color that you would like in your garden area. This means that you have much more control over the color pattern in your garden and of the way that you use these color patterns to help emphasize effects for onlookers.
The drawback of dyed woods is that some of the chemical dyes are not particularly good on a number of fronts. First, some of these dyes wash off during the first rain, staining the ground. Second, the chemicals used for dyeing are not positive for the plants and contribute to environmental problems. Finally, dyed woods are both a greater initial cost and a greater cost for maintaining. Dyes often fade over time when left out in the elements. This means that you will probably have to re-mulch the area more often than you would with plain non-dyed mulches.