Do It Yourself Mulch


mulch01In the past we have bagged all of the trimmings and placed them out for the garbage man. I know that Waste Management does a great job in utilizing waste, but something still just seemed wrong. We trim something natural and then just throw it away. Why?

My wife and I were talking one night and somehow the conversion rolled to mulch. What if we could take our trees and make our own mulch? Instead of tossing our trees on the curb (not literally), we wondered if we could take the trimmings and use it for the mulch around the trees… complete recycling!

We need to keep the budget low, since it doesn’t help if we have to pay a lot of money to make things better. We looked at some cutters and shredders on line and they are quite expensive. We did not want to spend a couple hundred dollars (or more) just to create mulch. So, we got creative.

We currently have someone mow the lawn every couple of weeks because we are so busy. With our yard, it would take us about two to threes hours to mow and trim. With weekend children’s sports and other events, sometimes it just didn’t get done. I still kept my old lawn mower; because I hate throwing things out (I’ll save that for another long story).

The mower is really a mower/mulcher. We had never tried, but what if it could chop up the branches and create mulch. My wife said, why not? We were not using it anyway, and as long as we were safe, the worst thing that would happen is that we would throw out something we didn’t use. Well, we decided to try it!