Learning About Landscaping Materials

Posted on: 1 November 2022

Mulching your garden beds comes with a lot of benefits. The mulch helps trap moisture in the soil so your plants have something to rely on when rain has been scarce. It also breaks down over time, adding nutrients back to the soil. Mulch can be made from almost any species of wood, but one option you'll see quite often is mulch made from the bark of pine trees. Here are some benefits of using pine bark as the mulch on your garden beds.

It has a natural color.

Mulch made from other species of trees is often dyed to give it a reddish-brown color. Eventually, that dye washes away, and the mulch just looks brown and drab. The dye also has a tendency to get on your hands and arms when you're spreading the mulch. Pine bark mulch, on the other hand, naturally has that reddish-brown color that many people love. The color lasts a lot longer, and you don't have to worry about stains when you're working with the mulch.

It is easy to spread.

Pine bark is relatively lightweight compared to mulch made from hardwood chunks and chips. This makes it a lot easier to spread, especially in a larger garden bed. You can fill a whole wheelbarrow with pine bark mulch, and it should be manageable for the average person to wheel. Shoving or spreading the mulch around in the garden bed is also quite manageable due to its weight.

It's high in aluminum.

As mentioned previously, mulch breaks down slowly to add nutrients to the soil. This is true of all wood mulches, but different wood mulches do contain different nutrients — and different amounts of those nutrients. Pine bark mulch, it turns out, is a good source of aluminum. This helps encourage plants to grow denser, greener foliage. So, with pine bark mulch, your plants will tend to become more attractive.

It is affordable and widely available.

A lot of pine wood is used in construction, which means there is lots of pine bark available to be used for things like mulching garden beds. You can find it at many home improvement stores, and there are lots of landscaping companies that will deliver loads of it. Pine bark mulch also tends to be cheaper than other options for the same reasons.

If you need mulch for your garden beds, strongly consider using landscaping pine bark mulch. It works well for many different types of plants.