Posted on 10/31/2011 6:02:40 AM PDT by orsonwb
Applying mulch around your trees, shrubs, garden, and landscape beds is one of the easiest and most effective ways of not only keeping plants healthy, but also reducing water usage, preventing weeds, minimizing mowing...
(Excerpt) Read more at howdogardener.com ...
Our local dump has piles of free mulch but most residents don’t use it. Why? For one thing, the mulch is newly ground up and not processed (heated) to kill any sort of bacteria etc... This free mulch, for example, may contain the disease that killed a tree. If used, it could spread to the tree in your yard. My FIL (who was the most thrifty of men since he was raised during the Depression) brought home a lot of it. He found a used needle in it (thank goodness he wasn’t stuck with that) and some rusty barb wire. We ended up taking him for a tetanus shot since the wire did cut him. After that... we bought mulch.
Thanks for saying it first. Don’t be a sucker, don’t ever use that free stuff for any horticultural application. Always use bagged mulch that you pay for.
Thanks, OKSooner. After I posted, I felt sort of bad since I wasn’t dissing the poster. I was simply pointing out some concerns and issues we have dealt with. I should have written that being in a relative urban county, needles and such are common in a lot of our area. However, every county (the most beautiful, pristine and nice) can still have a fungus or tree disease that weakened/or killed the tree. If that is in the mulch, it will spread not only to your tree.. but every tree around it.
Unless you do your own, the free mulch is usually loaded with weed seeds.
Same with free compost. Filled with weed seeds.
Well, now that you mention it I didn’t find any diss in your post but I’m the one who used the word “sucker”. No diss intended orson, but that free stuff at the dump comes from who knows where and always has some extra stuff in it...
I am just super careful now about posting after someone spend the time to post an article (I’ve gotten in trouble in the past” not with this poster but some others. I don’t know Orson well enough to think he/she is simply posting a good article for people to discuss. Sorry, OKSooner.
Useful tip: thanks!
You’re right to be careful and to help some of the rest of us out with it. Lotsa times here in cyberspace we kinda lose some of our sensitivity...
I’m afraid that I may be overly sensitive to relatively new freepers... simply because I don’t know them. Now... if this was posted by JoeSixPack, Grunthor, Diana from Wisconsin, Goat Granny, Salamander... even Laz... they know me well enough to understand it wasn’t personal. My comment may be STUPID but they understand that sometimes I post stupid comments. LOL!!!
Things can be a bit rough around here - usually in good fun, but what about the uninitiated?
Far be it from me to mention any names like Laz or anybody but you're right to offer discretion in "the unspoken code" for an unfamiliar poster who's no doubt a nice person and is just trying to help.
The best place to buy mulch is your local Boy Scout Troop when they sell it each spring.
(The fact that my oldest son will be crossing over to Boy Scouts in February and have to sell mulch for his new troop is purely coincidental...) :)
You have made a wonderful point, GreenLanternCorps. If you need to buy mulch, why not support your local troop in the process? Great idea!!
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