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Mulch: it’s the garden maintenance with the hidden fee because it is easy to forget in the March budget.

To keep our yard looking nice, I usually need to buy a bunch of bags of mulch every year. I never seem to have enough mulch for my garden! My husband teases me about my ability to estimate how much I need because he usually takes the number of bags that I said to buy, doubles it, and then I still need more.

Well, now that I’m jobless and not bringing in any money, I feel kinda silly buying mulch. Especially since we would easily spend more than $100 on it each spring, and that’s buying it when it’s on sale. So I got to thinking.

What could I do to save money on mulch?

Stick to your budget this spring and save money on all that mulch

An idea came to me when I was looking out into our backyard. We have a lot of trees back there, and when I was raking leaves in the fall, let’s just say I moved a bunch of piles to the playset area and so they still needed to be bagged even though winter is nearly over. (Here are my posts about that: Raking leaves and Raking leaves 2)

I had used up all of our special paper bags in the fall and hadn’t bought more yet -not to mention it is so much work to bag the seemingly never-ending supply of leaves.

Make your own quality flower garden mulch

Then it hit me. Rather than bag the leaves and put them out at the curb for spring pickup, I could mulch the leaves and take care of three problems at once.

Mulching the leaves solves 3 problems

  1. No need to spend money on more bags.
  2. No need to spend money on mulch.
  3. Gets rid of all the rest of our leaf piles.

With that in mind, I bought a leaf blower/mulcher with the idea that it was an investment that would save me money over time. As luck would have it, I found one that was only about $75 so it has already paid for itself in what I would’ve spent on mulch and leaf bags- and then some.

Full Disclosure: This is not a project that you want to take on if you want to save time. It’s a great money-saver, but it was super time-intensive. However, if you have the time, I think the savings are worth the effort.

Leaf piles before:

Here’s a picture of my progress with the leaf mulching:

Before and after around the playset:

Mulching leaves is hard work! By the time I finished, I was covered in dust, but happy.

What do you do with all of your leaves in the fall?

I’m open to any quicker ways to handle the massive amounts of leaves at our house. ?