Mulching of Beds

Mulch, in essence shredded or chipped tree bark, helps protects the shrubs, flowers, bulbs and trees that it surrounds by providing warm during the cooler temperatures while helping to store water and deflect heat and sunlight during the hotter and drier months. Apple Lawn Service has been providing our commercial and residential customers with various mulching schedules in order to meet their particular needs and wishes.

Mulch comes in various forms - chipped, shredded or ground. Colors also vary being either black, red, or the multitude shades of brown not to mention the newer designer shades that seem to pop up yearly.

Another added benefit of having your bed and tree rings areas mulched is that mulching, when combined with a good landscape or weed-block fabric, helps prevent weeds from constantly sprouting in the bed areas. However it must be noted that no weed block or landscape fabric can provide the magic bullet when ridding an area from weeds. Application of a pre-emergent also helps to curtail the amount of weeds that grow in the mulch beds but once again their is nothing on the market, short of asphalt and concrete, that will permanently rid your mulch beds of weeds. Most weeds that do sprout up in the mulch bed, even with a good landscape fabric that has been installed, normally are not growing from the soil beneath the mulch and fabric but instead the weeds are growing between the mulch and fabric itself. You can determine if this is the case simply by pulling the first weed you see. If the weed pulls through the fabric than it is growing in the soil beneath the fabric. However if the weed can be extracted rather easily, thus disturbing on the surrounding mulch, than the weed is growing between the mulch and fabric itself signaling that the fabric that is installed is of a good quality and performing as it should be.

At Apple Lawn Service we normally mulch our customers once in the early Spring finishing before the end of May while returning to mulch, if needed, around the middle of September or until the end of Fall depending on prevailing weather conditions.