Mulching Around

Back in April, I was very enthusiastic about getting my flower beds in shape.  I ordered 5 cubic yards of mulch and went to work.  Slowly day by day I made progress with weeding, digging and mulching, until May.   We had a very wet and rainy May so all the yard work I started in April, didn't get finished until recently.  Actually I'm not totally finished, I've saved the worst area for last and now that all the weeds have grown in, it just might wait until next year.  

Four years ago, I weeded and mulched my flower beds.  Unfortunately I didn't keep it up and my flower beds were back to looking like those before pictures.  You can check out that post HERE.  Luckily after all my days of hard work, the flower beds now look like those after pictures from four years ago too.  

The one thing I never did was to mulch around the two trees we have in our back yard.  We just let the grass grow right up to the tree so there was some tall grass growing around the base of the tree since we didn't use the weed wacker with every mow.   Well, this year I took care of that and I love the way it looks, plus it makes it easier to mow around the trees.  

Here's the before and after:

The first thing I did was to dig a little trench around the tree.  I used a string loosely tied around the tree to mark off a circle with spray paint.   

Then I laid down some newspaper over the grass rather than digging up all the grass.  I've heard that will kill the grass/weeds underneath and prevent them from growing through the mulch.  It's been almost two weeks and no weeds yet.

And here it is all filled in with mulch:

Another before and after for you.  I like it so 'mulch' better.  Sorry for the bad pun, I couldn't help myself.

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