hi there my name is John Holden I graduated from the University of Connecticut in 1992 with a bachelor's degree in ornamental horticulture in 1993 I started land designs unlimited I design install and maintain landscapes for homeowners in Upper Fairfield County Connecticut today I'd like to share my passion with you how you doing today folks today I'd like to talk to a little bit about how to remote your gardens and before I get started I just want to mention that I'm going to leave my hat on today I usually try to take the head off it makes me look a little more mature I don't look like a 20 year old talking about this stuff but with the Sun the way it is today if I was going to leave my hat on I would basically have sunburn and appealing hit in about an hour and the other benefit is they say that you know all you bald guys out there like me being bald is a sign of high testosterone so if you got it flaunt it but anyways what I'd like to do today is just talk to you a little bit about how to remote your Gardens and there's there's two different ways of mulching in my book there's mulching a new garden where you want to go through the garden and put down a good two to three inch layer over the entire garden and I've got a separate video for that and I'll leave a link over here to that video and then there's Remo Qing Gardens and when you're relaunching gardens you're not really trying to apply a super deep layer you just want to put down enough mulch that the gardens are going to look nice it's going to be deep enough to keep the weeds out or you know inhibit the growth of weeds and keep the moisture in so before we get started I want to mention that before you re mulch gardens hopefully you've already gone through your gardens and done a few things and the first thing I hope you've done is go through and take your rake and clean up any leaves that are in the garden you know get any leaves sticks debris out of those Gardens the next thing I hope you do before you read mulch your gardens is go through with a hole or your hands or a weeding knife and take care of any weeds in the gardens go ahead and get them out of there once you finish weeding your gardens I hope you'll take your edger and I've got some great videos about edging you know take your edger out cut a nice fresh edge so that that mulch is going to have really nice contrast against the grass and then the final thing I hope you do before you remote your gardens is to go ahead and take a cultivator or a garden weasel like this guy here you could take a metal rake you could even use a shovel if you wanted to and you really want to cultivate your mulch before applying more and that's going to lead me to a discussion about the three musts of mulching there's three very important things when you're mulching I've got a separate video I'm going to I'm going to put a link to it over here but whenever you're mulching the three musts are you must keep your mulch under three inches deep you must cultivate your mulch before applying new mud mulch and you must avoid touching the base of trees and shrubs when mulching and again there's a great video I'll put it right here it's going to talk a little bit more about that so now that we're ready to go ahead and re mulch our gardens you know how do you do that and here's another big difference between mulching gardens for the first time and REE mulching gardens if I'm mulching Gardens for the first time I will go ahead and dump wheelbarrows and mulch and then and then I'll take this tool right here this pitchfork and use this pitchfork to go ahead and spread the mulch I'll just kind of push it around but because we're remoulding we really don't want to add that much mulch we're adding just enough to basically cover what's there and bring the depth up to about two two inches and with mulching I'd rather you see two two and a half inches deep than three that's the ideal range you know this is not one of those cases where we're more is better so what we're going to do is we're going to leave our mulch in the wheelbarrow and if you don't have a pitchfork like this and you're going to have you know five yards 10 yards 15 yards deliver to your house it's a great tool to have it really makes it very easy to shovel out of the pile and put it in the wheelbarrow and when you're buying your pitchfork you know they make really big ones which are great if you can benchpress like 200 pounds if you're pretty stocky guy but if you're what I would consider the average homeowner this is a great tool it's good for scooping mulch out of the pile this is great for cleaning up brush in the yard it's really a nice all-purpose tool for you so you've got your mulch delivered you've got your mulch in the wheelbarrow and what you're going to actually do when it comes time to spread the mulch is just leave the mulch in the wheelbarrow and write out and I like to use either short-handled shovel shovel like this guy here or a short-handled pitchfork like we have down there that's my ideal tool to mulch because it's short-handled you can kind of move it around easier it's much more convenient to scoop out of the wheelbarrow and what I'm going to do is I am just going to work my way through the gardens and spread you know shake some off with the shovel now that we're ready to go ahead and start spreading the mulch all you want to do is you know bring your wheelbarrow close to the gardens or if you can find a way to get it to the back of the garden you know if you're not going to trample any plants wheel that wheelbarrow into the back and that way you'll just save yourself a lot of effort you know if you've got to go through you know your prized peonies or something definitely take the extra time to go you know and walk a few steps but there's absolutely nothing wrong you know don't do it all the time but there's nothing wrong with taking a wheelbarrow through the back of a landscape bed like this and what you're basically going to do is just go ahead and scoop that mulch right out of the wheelbarrow and then you're just going to kind of you know flick it and it takes a little while to get it down but you're just going to you know flick that mulch and spread it around the base of the plants and you know the mulch I just threw you can see I went right up to the edge of the plants but there's still plenty room underneath there where there's no mulch and that's okay because we're going to be doing more harm than good if we start trying to dump mulch underneath the plants now today I'm spreading hemlock mulch and this is pretty much my go-to mulch it's pure hemlock bark and if you want to see a great video about choosing the right mulch I will put a link to that right here but you know for most jobs I'll use this pure hemlock bark its bark because it has a nice deep brown color spreads very nicely it's very finely ground so it doesn't look chunky and it really holds its color nice so you know if you've got a multiplier in the area definitely take a look at the pure hemlock bark but we're just going to basically work our way through the garden and you know just just put enough mulch on top of what is there to basically you know cover the old mulch and you know add maybe an inch or so the key is we want to keep our mulch under two and a half you know two and a half to three inches or so that's that's as deep as we want to see and you'd be amazed how quickly it goes you know once you get in the rhythm of things Remo chin the garden let me move the camera and I'll show you how I do with this perennials okay now I'm around the back of the house and there's some perennials here and I'd like to show you how I go about mulching around perennials but before I do I just want to show you one other way to spread mulch you know just because I use the shovel and I kind of throw it you know that doesn't mean you have to do it that way the other thing you can do is don't be afraid to just put some on the shovel and then just kind of shake it off through the garden it's going to take a little bit longer but it's going to do the job just as well and you know if you don't have the same muscles that I have you know it's definitely easier to do it this way you can kind of hold that shovel than to try to fling that mulch all over the garden I also like to shake the mulch off like that if I've got a ground cover of pachysandra or vinca I'll go through and I'll shake the mulch off very lightly over the top of the ground cover not too deep and then just either take a rake and kind of brush the mulch in or take my leaf blower and just give it a quick blow there so around these perennials what I'm going to do is I'm going to basically do the same type of mulching I'm just going to scoop up the mulch and then spread it around the base here this is penstemon pretty much the same idea I don't mind if the mulch you know touches the base of the perennials but I don't want it to be super heavy I don't want like you know my shovel to end up being a little deeper and have four inches of mulch resting against the the base of the perennials I'm going to say that I'm not quite as finicky with the perennials you know because they are perennials and they're they're used to growing in the soil if they spread out and grow into the mulch that's okay but around you know the base of trees and shrubs I'm still very careful about you know not having that mulch brush up against the base of the trees and shrubs and you know it's it's again just take your time you know there's no need to be in a rush I find that when I actually don't rush I work quicker than when I do rush and you will be amazed at how quickly mulching can go so that's pretty much how I would I would go ahead and mulch around the base of perennials you know you don't have to be quite as finicky if a little bit of mulch touches the perennials it's okay but just please you know don't don't dump mulch on the perennials either it's not good for them now if you've got a tree a single stem tree in your landscape like this one here you have to remember the three months of mulching mulch must not touch the trunk of trees and shrubs so what you're going to do here is you're going to just apply your mulch but leave you know a six to twelve inch gap around the base of the tree and that is infinitely better than what's known as volcano mulching where people end up putting you know this mound of mulch around the base of the tree and if I touch the tree with a little bit of mulch it's okay that's it's almost like leaf litter you know I try to taper down that last six six inches to a foot it's not so much that I'm trying to completely not mulch that area but I just don't want that mulch to get deeper so the trees are going to have a little bit of space there they're not going to get suffocated by the mulch and then you can just work your way right around the tree now if you get a little bit too much mulch by the tree don't be afraid to just you know kneel down and just brush it away a little bit it's really that easy and that's what a properly mulch tree is supposed to look like let me zoom in for you if you can mulch a tree and have it look like this you are so far ahead of the game it's going to make a huge difference for your landscape your trees are going to be healthier they're going to live longer and you're just really doing a great thing for your landscape when you're mulching the edge of your Gardens there's two different ways you can go you can put the mulch at the same height as the grass or you can basically you know leave the mulch the same depth all the way and you may end up with like a 1 or 2 inch depression or gap at the edge of the bed there and that depression is nice if you're the type of person who's going to take the weed whacker and run around the edge of your gardens maybe once a month it does a really nice job leaving some definition between you know the edge of the beds and the lawn but if you're not going to use the weed whacker to cut the edge of the beds and I'm going to have to make a video showing you how to do that I recommend you just you know use the same level as the grass just fill that trench at the edge of your beds to the same level as the grass so basically all you're going to do with the edge then is just you know scoop that mulch off and just do the same thing you can kind of see you know once you get the trick you can just kind of throw it along the edge and it'll just fill in that trench well folks we've gone ahead and finished mulching this property and all it's left to do now is I'm just going to take the backpack blower put it on keep the RPMs at a slower speed and just go ahead and blow off the edge of the gardens any mulch I might have spilled on some plants I'll touch them with the blower and then any stepping stones or some stepping stones as well I'll go ahead and clean those up too now it goes a little bit quicker for me because I can put the mulch on the truck and just scoop it right off the truck so it's you know the saying we use is move at once you know I basically just push into the wheelbarrow and spread it I don't have to pick it up put in the wheel barrel and then move it again if you like the video please go ahead and subscribe to my channel and also if you liked the video please just go ahead and click that little like button down below if you have any questions please visit my blog at LAN designs com thank you very much for watching today folks and I hope I helped you out to mulch your gardens take care you