Where to Get Free Mulch

What is the lowest price you can get on landscaping mulch? Free! We have been sourcing free mulch for our garden beds, landscaping, and trees for a few years now and will never go back to bagged big box mulch! Although they do have some pretty colored wood chips in a bag (what are they using to dye that stuff anyway?) we have found the ultimate place to get the same product for free.

Last year I did a post on dressing up our trees and preparing them for winter and I also did a post on planting our fruit bushes and vines. In both occasions I used this same supply of mulch but thought I would go into more detail on where we are getting it from.



We have spent many years buying bags of mulch from the big box stores spending up to $100 per year to dress up our flower beds and around some of our trees. One day while at our local rustic city park we noticed the big pile of wood chips off to the side. I couldnt believe that they would just pile all that there for anyone to take. I called the city to be sure it was ok to load up my truck and have since made many trips to this park to get my annual fix of mulch.

Different times of year yield different grades of mulch so you have a choice of what you want based on your use. I have noticed that if you go first thing in the spring you have your choice of last years wood pile which has been semi broken down and would be great to sift through to amend garden beds. You also have the years first trimming which is usually shredded pine branches and needles from cleanup around the city and the recent Christmas season (city pickups up Christmas trees I believe). Later during the summer you have fresh mulch coming I each month with varying colors and shades that is perfect for landscaping.



Many people are trying things like the back to Eden gardening method or deep mulch gardening.  There is no need to pay for truck loads of wood chips and mulch when you have access to free resources like this. Some cities may even offer deliver for you for a small fee or even free depending on where you live. This is just another great free resources for starting gardens landscaping with sustainable materials, or just adding to your orchards.



Give your local city hall or township offices a call to see where they put all of there tree trimmers for the year. Ill bet youll be surprised at how eager they are to get rid of them!

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Fall Composting Where the Best Soil Begins

When should I start composting? What do I add to the pile? How long does it take? Can I add.....? I get composting questions all the time from friends and family; my answer is always the same - Start with leaves! In this video I talk about our method of starting our compost pile each fall. We usually get enough to let it cook down twice per year which equals a lot of fresh homemade compost for our gardens.

I have talked about this before in my fall composting with a string trimmer post and also in last years easy composting method video. Good compost starts with leaves! they are all around us in the fall time and unless you live in the deep south, the jungle, or a desert you have plenty of leaves to use. Even if you dont want to rake up your own leaves there are probably plenty of your neighbors who are bagging up theirs and leaving them at the curb for the city to pick-up (if your city does that kind of thing). The bottom line is this, get as many leaves as you can because they are going to be the base of the compost you will use throughout the entire year.


Once I have all of our leaves raked up I start carting them to the compost pile in the back corner of our lot. It is nothing special, just a few cheap metal posts, some garden wire fencing, and a pile of leaves and food scraps in the middle. As I am carting the leaves to the pile I also take care of cleaning up the garden beds of all dead and dying vegetable plants from the summer and layer those on the pile in-between loads of the leaves. This creates a layers of alternating carbon material (leaves) and nitrogen material (green plants and food scraps). Once I have all of the leaves in I top it off with our food scraps from the last couple of months that have been saved as the compost from the summer finished up.

This is all that needs to be done for the fall. Just let the pile site and you can add your food scraps to it all winter long. If you prefer you can also cover the pile as many like to do but I have found that to be largely unnecessary.

In the spring time you need to start turning the pile with a pitch fork every couple of weeks and get it cooking down. As the temps rise it will start to reduce in size and after about 60 days you will be ready to add this fresh homemade compost to amend your gardens.

There should be no need to ever, and I mean ever, buy fertilizer for an everyday garden. Compost can provide all of the macro and micro nutrients that any plants need. Give it a try, youll be happily surprised!

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Hoedown by Audionautix is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

Artist: http://audionautix.com/

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