If you are planting some young trees, you are going to want to make sure that you are taking the proper steps to protect these young trees. Mulch is one of the best ways that you can protect your young trees. However, you need to make sure that you are putting down the mulch correctly.
Remove Weeds
Before you put down the mulch, you need to prepare the area where the mulch is going to go. To do that, you need to remove the weeds within a couple feet diameter of the tree. You don't want there to be any weeds present when you put down the mulch. The mulch should help prevent new weeds from growing around the base of your tree and competing with your tree for water. However, the mulch will not kill existing weeds, so you need to get rid of those before you put the mulch down.
Type of Mulch
You are going to want to go with natural mulch. Natural mulch is the best type of mulch to put around your tree. Natural mulch is made out of either wood chips or bark. Avoid mulch that has additional dye added as well.
Mulch Placement
You are going to want to put the mulch around the base of the tree. The mulch should cover the entire area where the roots are present. For a young tree, this is not going to be that far out from the tree. For larger trees, the area that needs to be covered with mulch could be up to ten feet around the base of the tree.
The idea is to cover the entire root base of the tree to protect and insulate the roots of the tree. The root base is generally about as wide as the canopy of the tree, so use the width of the canopy of the tree as your guideline for how wide to spread the mulch.
When you put the mulch down, you are going to want to lay the mulch down so that it is a couple of inches deep. For the mulch to provide benefits to your tree, it needs to be a thick layer of mulch, not a thin layer of mulch.
Also, make sure that you don't put the mulch right up against the trunk of the tree. You want to leave a few inches between the trunk of the tree and where the mulch starts. This will provide your tree with much-needed breathing room.
Putting mulch around your tree will protect the soil around your tree from compaction, and will help keep weeds away that will compete with your tree for resources. Mulch will also help regulate the temperature of the soil around your tree and help keep water where it should be.
For more information about tree removal and pruning, contact a local tree service.