Mulching for low maintenance

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Melissande Chillicothe, OH May 01, 2020

I am over 60 and want to make my small yard easy to maintain (as much as possible). I am moving some flowerbeds to contain them into an area that's easy to mow around them, and also planting some around trees to make mowing around the trees easier.

I ruled out rubber mulch for multiple reasons though it would be low maintenance for longer until I had to find a way to dispose of the old stuff and apply new rubber mulch. I'm also not find of the idea of the chemicals and smell of it. So let's leave that out of the equation. I also don't want to use landscaping fabric that would need to be dug up and replaced.

I bought some pine bark mulch to get started. I plan to put some layers of newspaper down before adding 2 inches of mulch. I understand that the newspaper needs to be re-appplied annually.

Some questions come to mind:

How do you reapply (or do you re-apply) the newspaper and how often? What I want to know is if I need to remove last year's mulch and dispose of it, just add more mulch over last year's mulch (if so, how much?), do I just pull the mulch back, add more newspaper, then spread it back over the new paper?

Ideally, I would prefer a no-maintenance mulching solution, but I know there probably is no such thing.

I have another question about how to edge the areas I will mulch but I'll put that in a separate post to keep this one from being too complicated.

Thanks!!!

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hcmcdole Powder Springs, GA(Zone 7b) May 01, 2020

I don't use newspaper but I have heard of it in veggie beds. If you do put it down and then spread a light layer of organic mulch on top it would last a year or more. If you want to apply more paper the following year, you could rake back the organic material (what is left of it) and put the new paper down and re-use the organic material and add new material if needed.

I quit using pine bark mulch as it doesn't lock in place and a good hard rain will move it whichever way the water is moving. I have had better luck with cypress mulch as the pieces are of various sizes and lock into place a lot better.

Weeds will still come up in mulch but easier to pull out if the roots don't hit the soil below the paper.

I used landscape fabric nearly 14 years ago to kill part of our Bermuda lawn as it is tough to dig or Rototill. The fabric did the trick by blocking the sun and a pine straw mulch hid the fabric. I am in the process of removing the fabric this year. Good for some things and bad for other applications. I would never use it for an annual bed or even perennials but for shrubs and trees it worked out fairly well.

The azaleas did okay with landscape fabric for example.

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Post #10479391
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Melissande Chillicothe, OH May 02, 2020

Thanks for your experience with mulching.

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