Tis the season for mulch! – The Garden Fairies

If you’re a fan of endless weeding, then now is a great time to be out in the garden! With Spring in the air, the warming climate means weeds are going to be coming thick and fast from here on out!

While the task of weeding a garden can be a tad soul-destroying if you have a lot of landscape to cover or you’re dealing with particularly fast-growing weeds, it can be really satisfying to reach the end of a long hard day of pesky-plant-plucking, and know that a hot bath/cool glass of wine/relaxing massage is waiting for you at the end of it all. And gosh, it’s going to be the best bath/glass of wine/massage you’ve ever had!

…Until you go through the rigamarole all over again in two weeks time – when the weeds are back!

Alternatively, if weed-wrangling is not your thing, or you just want a break from the ongoing baby triffid maintenance in order to focus on other aspects of the garden (such as pruning! Or, the general enjoyment of relaxing amid your own little slice of nature!) then a good thick layer of organic mulch might be more up your alley.

If you haven’t already applied mulch to your garden, now is a good time to get on with it. A Spring mulch application will help your garden to retain soil moisture through Summer, meaning you can water it less. Mulch also provides insulation for plants during winter, so Autumn is another great time to mulch.

Organic mulch (ie stuff that was once a plant, and is now made up of lots of chopped up/rotted down pieces of plant) will break down over time, and by doing so it will return nutrients to your soil. As well as being beneficial to the health of your garden, mulch looks great, smells wonderful, and gives even a relatively minimalistic garden area a ‘finished’ look.

Applying mulch can be an exhausting task, but it’s well worth the effort. If you have a strong back and a couple of mates (or a couple of mates with strong backs!) a decent mulch application can be completed in a few hours – depending on the size of your garden. Waking up to stiff aching muscles the next day is a sign of a good extra-hard day’s work, and whatever doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger, right?!

We Garden Fairies tend to think of mulch jobs as Boot Camp for Gardeners, and we love the challenge! (Especially if we can rope in a couple of Garden Gnomes to help lug ;)) So if your Auckland garden deserves the nutritional and visual perk of a mulch application this season, get in touch with us and we’ll get on to it for you!