Try these tips for doing it homegrown. You know farmers and backyard gardeners have something in common, they both want to save money, they both want to save time. Now how can we backyard gardeners be wise and yet grow the healthiest plant possible? With these stuffs right here mulch. Let’s go spread some around.

There are a lot of great reasons to use mulch. First of all, when you add mulch beneath the plant, you're going to conserving soil and moisture which means your water bill is going to be less. Also when you add mulch beneath the plant it’s going to keep the soil warmer in the winter and cooler in the summer which means you're going to have a healthier plant.

And if you're tired to getting down your hands and knees and pulling weeds then you definitely want to add mulch because it suppresses weeds so you're not spending so much time on your hands and knees. And finally, my favorite reason for adding mulch, it’s a natural fertilizer that means, you're going to save a lot of money.

There are a lot of prices for mulch, some of them free, some of them you have to pay for. I brought some to show you and we’re going to start with the free stuff your own lawn. That’s right, after you cut your lawn if you don’t have a mulch anymore if you spread this out and let it try and then apply it to your yard as a mulch about two inches thick you have a great source for mulch. If you have a lot of pine needles, this makes great acidic mulch beneath your gardenias and camellias. Again, you’d want to make it about two or three inches deep throughout the entire under story of the plant. These are chip tree parts. If you have a chip or shredder and you need to take down a tree, save these because this is some of the best mulch going.

Spoiled hay makes great mulch, you can put that around your vegetable garden as well. Now there are some mulches you can’t buy that well frankly look a lot better. Small bark looks good beneath rose bushes. Now the only problem with small bark is it kind of blows away in a heavy wind or if you use some sort of blower to blow leaves away that may not be the best what you may want instead is bigger bark and bigger bark applied around your rose bushes, around your ornamental plants looks really great and it last a long time.

There's another mulch that’s available, it’s called shredded bark or gorilla hair and it probably is among the nicer looking of the mulches but the problem with this is its highly flammable. So if you're a smoker, you may want to avoid this or quit smoking in the garden. Finally there's composed which makes a great mulch. This is just organic compose that frankly you can make from your own kitchen scraps or you can buy it bulk. Rocks look great in a yard as a mulch and it will suppress weeds but the downside of the rocks in the summertime these rocks absorb a lot of heat and that cooks the roots of your plants.

Now there's another couple of sources of mulch that you may want to try in you're vegetable garden. Come with me I’ll show you. Another couple of items you can use as mulch, this is called the weed cloth. It is not plastic it’s actually made of a palmer that is permeable to air and water. It has two sides, a smooth side and a bumpy side. You want to put the smooth side on the top so that the air and water will flow through and this does a great job of suppressing weeds. Some downsides to this, you're going to have to put something on top of it to hold it in place and it doesn’t really feed the soil because the molts that may be on top holding it in place can’t get through.

But still, it will do a good job of suppressing weeds. Something the old timers used to use and you can use it in your vegetable garden are sections of newspaper. Newspapers last about a season, put them on about a section at a time and it will suppress weeds. You have to put something on top, what's great about this is that at the end of the season, they all have disappeared. So there's no cleanup. But again, you’ll have to put something on top of it to hold it in place. There's a couple of good ideas for some inexpensive mulches. Add some mulch, that’s what I have to do right now. I’ll see you.