Quick Tip: Cover Your Plants Prior to Mulching 

By Jennifer Poindexter

Mulching is a garden chore that’s labor-intensive, but makes your home and garden look wonderful after it’s done.

Do you struggle when applying mulch to ensure you don’t cover any plants too deeply in the process?

I came across a wonderful tip a while ago that helped me avoid this problem. Here’s how you can mulch your flower beds easier:

Quick Tip: Cover Your Plants Prior to Mulching 

When you’re mulching, it’s intense. Whether you’re spreading the mulch, dumping the mulch, or shoveling mulch, it all requires a lot of exertion on your part.

For this reason, it can be difficult to spread the right amounts of mulch in the right places. 

One risk is applying mulch too heavily to a mature perennial plant. When this occurs, you must return and dig the plant out from under the mulch, to ensure it doesn’t suffocate. 

I’ve been there, and I know it’s annoying to do twice the work.

A way to avoid this is placing flower pots over your plants. Whether they’re new plants, mature plants, perennials, or annuals, the tip should work.

Find a flower pot that’s large enough to fit over your plants and slip it over them. Then apply the mulch to the area. 

If you get a little heavy-handed, the worst case scenario is you’ll dust off a flower pot before removing it.

This protects your plants from becoming buried during the mulch application process, and it also saves you from digging a plant out from beneath the mulch.

No need to buy special pots for this. I like to save my planting containers I receive from the nursery when purchasing plants.

I like to use them when mulching, but they’re also excellent for starting seeds. Pull out whatever you have saved, and use them each time you’re ready to mulch a garden area.

The durable plastic should make it so the containers don’t collapse around the plant even if they get a large amount of mulch placed on them.

If you don’t have any flower pots or containers, consider using buckets, harvesting tubs, or you might even be able to utilize large trash bags for bigger plants. 

The trash bags won’t be as durable, but at least they’ll serve as a visible marker to encourage you to stay away from the plant. 

Plus, when you go to remove the trash bag, it should make it easier for the mulch to fall to the wayside.

Small pointers along the way help make a strenuous task a little easier. Hopefully, by covering your plants prior to mulching, it makes the process smoother for you.  

More About Mulching

https://carteret.ces.ncsu.edu/2021/08/mulching-your-garden-beds/

https://hortnews.extension.iastate.edu/using-mulch-garden

https://extension.okstate.edu/fact-sheets/mulching-garden-soils.html