Caring for a beautiful garden takes more than just time – it also takes careful planning and smart decision making. The choices that you make when caring for your plants will be directly reflected in the way they look all season long. Using mulch is one of the choices that you can make to increase your chances of growing healthy plants in your garden. Mulch has a number of amazing benefits, and you can even make it yourself. Mulch is generally made up of decomposing organic plant matter which will offer wonderful nutrients to your plants. Dedicated gardeners will often create their own mulch using things like grass clippings, trimmed parts of plants, and even food scraps, but you can purchase yours at the home store if you would rather.
Keep Water Where You Need It Most
Plants need water – that isn’t breaking news, even to someone who has never planted a seed. However, simply spraying water in your garden beds isn’t necessarily going to do the trick. If you have poor soil, the water could just drain right through the dirt, leaving your plants struggling to find the moisture they need. With plenty of the best mulch in your beds, your dirt should do a much better job of holding onto the water you supply, meaning your plants will not go thirsty.
Keep Soil in Place as Well
Have you ever gone out to tend to your garden after a heavy rain to find that much of your soil has washed away? To prevent that problem from affecting your landscaping, work mulch into the dirt to help keep everything where it should be. You are still bound to have a little bit of soil wash away when the rain pounds down, but mulch will help to minimize the damage.
Prevent the Spread of Pests
Nothing can take out an entire garden faster than an invasion of pests, but fortunately, a healthy application of a good mulch can help prevent those pests from becoming a problem. The key here is to include the right types of ingredients in your mulch to address the pests that are native to your area. For instance, some pests are deterred by tree bark, but you will need to know what kind of tree bark to use in order to stop pests that are likely to be found in your geographic region.
It Looks Great!
There is a rich and healthy look to most mulch products that will lend a finished look to your garden. You want to be able to enjoy looking at your garden throughout the growing season, and a great mulch application should help bring everything together nicely. So, not only is mulch practical in terms of what it can do for the health of your plants, it also has benefits from a strictly aesthetic standpoint. For the gardener who is serious about getting the most from every plant that goes into the ground, there is nothing quite like mulch to get the job done.