Mulch Mania 2010

Last year I ordered mulch - both straw bales and triple shredded from Family Home & Garden and mulched the whole yard to keep the weeds down. However, I apparently didn't record how many bales/bags I bought anywhere! I remember that I did some measuring and it came out about right - I think I might have had a few extra bales at the end.

This year I'm ready to mulch again and I did another measuring effort using a long 100' tape measure I bought - however, I did very rough measurements and when I added them all up and did my mulch math, the numbers didn't make any sense. So, either my mulch math is wrong or my measuring was wrong or both.

So, I decided to back into how to much to order based on how much I spent last year - which Quicken was able to tell me thankfully. I plan to keep track of how many bales I spread where and then record that here for future reference.

My mulch assumptions were that one 2 cu ft bag of mulch covers 11.85 sq ft (this was based on what I read in perennials for dummies - that 1 cu yard covers 160 sq ft). The lady from FHG told me that one bale of pine straw covers 40-45 sq ft. Hopefully, that's about right.

Anyway, I'll report back how many I end up using of what so I can make this process less time consuming in the future and stop being such a time waster!!