How to Mulch a Garden Bed | Ask This Old House

roots but take a look at this azalea it these branches are buried in mulch and you can't even see the main trunk of the plant you take and scrape all this off look at easily i'm getting four to six inches of old mulch off of the plant now the branches are up in the air and you can see the main stem right there yeah so we need to strip some mulch off of this bed and also look over here your window well the mulch is already up to the top if you put any more mulch on top of that if it rains the water is going to come down and go where into my window and into my basement we don't want that to happen no we don't so we're going to strip the mulch out of this bed but before that we're going to come out we're going to cut a nice fresh edge right along the bed okay let's get to work this is the tool we're going to use to cut the edge with it's called an edger it has a half moon steel shape to it it's got a little pad for your feet so you can really stomp on it and this one has a steel handle that won't break so what we're going to do is we're going to line it up jump on it and pick up the piece of soil and you can see there's a little bit of grass in there what happens is people will flick this up into the bed and this grass will just grow and become a problem and they've also added soil to the bed so they have to put more mulch on top of that so what we're going to do is we're going to clear that all out along with the excess mulch so why don't you start down that end edging and we'll meet in the middle excellent you always watch your line now you're trying to make a nice clean edge on this but you're trying to make a nice smooth one too yeah see how we have a nice curve coming down here and it lines up really nice yeah all right that looks pretty good let's get all this edging and all the excess mulch out of this bed excellent roger how do you know that you've gone deep enough well when you start seeing the topsoil which is this brown area here and you start picking up all these little roots that means you've gone deep enough yeah take and scoop all that stuff out of the edge just don't disturb that nice cut we made there okay i want to see that when you're done okay what i want to do is get all the heavy stuff off the bed using the rake then i'm going to get down with my car and just clean out around the plants themselves all right roger this wheelbarrow looks full what should i do with all this now take it around back put it in your compost pile and then it'll break down and turn into compost all right excellent roger do you want to dig down a little bit to make it so that the water stays in there for the shrubs no you don't want to create a ring these roots have actually come out into the soil all the way and that's where you want the water and that's what will happen with an inch or two of mulch it'll let the water go down and the roots will be fine okay make sense wow roger what a difference i guess i did have a lot of mulch here this bed is all ready to put new mulch in but before we do that i want to take a look at this cherry over here if you look at it it has what we call a mulch volcano around it when mouse gets piled up around the trunk of a tree every season it starts to resemble a volcano the mulch will actually smother the primary root system and a secondary root system will grow into the mulch these roots can girdle the trunk and ultimately strangle the tree we've got to remove this mulch to make your tree healthy again we're going to take these cultivators and dig very carefully around the trunk of the tree removing the excess mulch okay so roger do you think we're going to have to replant these hostas no i think they'll be fine once we re-mulch this bed what i want to do is get all the stuff out of here so we can take a look at the roots okay all right look right here this is a root flare right there and here's a primary root coming off it everything above that is a secondary root growth and we're going to cut it out now when i work in the dirt like this i don't use a brand new pair of hand pruners because i'll ruin them cut that one out and then i'll take that one out all right i might as well get rid of this one now this is a real culprit you can see it's actually already wrapping around the trunk i'm going to cut it here and then we're going to do a little more excavation and see if we can find any more there we go excellent now i don't have to worry about these growing back or will they well you know we're going to put a lot less mulch in here so the chances are they won't have a place to grow but we'll keep an eye on it maybe check it in five or ten years okay all right let's get this stuff cleaned out well one thing you did right you dump the mulch on the driveway so many times homeowners will dump it on their lawn and then by the time they move the mulch the lawn's dead underneath so congratulations thank you here's another thing homeowners do wrong they try to use a pointed shovel like this to do mulch now that's hard to dig in and you don't get a lot of mulch with it look what you get so this is my tool for mulch this is called an insulated fork it has 10 tines and they're pointed it's used by farmers to move manure around i use it to move mulch around because i can take this and in about four scoops i can fill the wheelbarrow so if you bring that over there we'll get started mulching great now another thing that happens people try to dump the mulch into the bed and two things can happen number one you can crush this nice edge that we made number two you dump too much mulch in and you end up piling it up again so what i like to do is actually take it out of the wheelbarrow set it in place and then spread it out using little piles instead of pig piles you get that rake you can start raking out these piles and remember i only wanted an inch or two thick no thicker than that okay roger how close do i want to go to these shrubs now around the plants you don't have to push it all the way up under the plants you want to just take and bring it to the drip line you can do this by hand or you can do it with a rake but that way there we're not getting mulch up against the branches or the trunk of anything now greg along the edge we don't want to build the mulch up if it's built up like this you can't keep it trimmed and the grass will grow in there yeah if you keep it down like we have there it's air space the grass can't grow in and then you can just take your string trimmer and go right along the edge and keep that nice and neat so take that little bit of mulch out of there okay now remember this plant these branches were absolutely buried in mouths now you can see the main trunk here and the branches are all lifted up out of the mulch will that make that plant flower more absolutely going forward it will flower more it's a much happier plant all right let's finish up with this tree you want to give me a scoop in here now what we're going to do is we're going to take and just spread it really thin but we're not going to get any up against the trunk of the tree we want to let that breathe we're just going to put a inch coating out here where the roots are try and help you spread it a little bit here thank you i appreciate that looking good much better than before i love this brown mulch too this is my favorite pastas are tough this should be fine okay you got one more for me on the other side sure well i think we're good yeah roger it was a lot more work than i thought it was going to be but i know the plants are healthier and it looks a lot more cleaner for sure it looks great

Channel: This Old House

Views: 1,732,698

Keywords: This Old House, Ask This Old House, DIY, Home Improvement, DIY Ideas, Renovation, Renovation Ideas, How To Fix, How To Install, How To Build, Raised-bed Gardening, Garden, Gardening, Do It Yourself, garden bed, landscape architect, home repair, renovation, landscaping, yard, much, roger cook, norm abram, tom silva, tom silva this old house, tom silva house, tom silva construction, tom silva tools, tommy silva

Id: VGyZ9YZOr94

Length: 8min 13sec (493 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 05 2016