These days it’s not only the grass that appears greener in your neighbor’s yard. Take a look at his mulch. Chances are good your neighbor’s ground cover started out more colorful than yours and is staying that way longer.
Plain brown mulches are starting to look passe. Trend-conscious gardeners are dressing up their flower beds in earthy red tones, rich golds and dramatic black.
The reason? The popular but controversial cypress mulch is getting some heavy competition from lava rock and dyed mulch made from pest trees including Australian pines, Brazilian pepper and melaleuca.
Environmental groups and government agencies, such as the Palm Beach County (Fla.) Solid Waste Authority, have been encouraging gardeners to find alternatives to cypress mulch, which they say contributes to depletion of native vegetation. This environmental consciousness and a desire to add some pizzazz to garden beds have fueled a market for the alternatives.
Typically, a good mulch defines bed lines, adds color and texture to the garden, suppresses weed growth, reduces soil temperature, retains moisture in the soil and breaks down to enrich the soil with organic matter.
National Groundcover of Boynton Beach, Fla., has been selling Magic Rainbow mulch, an organic alternative that does all these things, for more than a year. But it also does something more — it’s guaranteed to retain its reddish color for up to six months. Varieties of similar organic products are available from other companies throughout the United States.
“I have been in the mulch business almost 11 years and this is the most exciting product I have seen,” says Pat Booth, National Groundcover’s general manager. “It’s amazing that we can make a product that substitutes for cypress and lasts longer.”
Magic Rainbow is made from trees that have been cut down for landscaping purposes, pest trees, trees cleared by land developers and trees that have died or been blown down by storms. It is colored with manufactured rust (iron oxide), which experts say is environmentally safe.
“Iron oxide is fine for covering mulches,” says Bruce Adams, conservation coordinator for the South Florida Water Management District. “In fact, in time it will release some iron that is beneficial to the plants and keeps them a little greener over time. Iron oxide is often used in fertilizers, and it is one of the constituents in healthy plant growth.”
Another bonus is that Magic Rainbow saves labor during application. A hose attached to a truck known as an Express Blower allows one operator to spray up to 55 cubic yards of mulch per hour. A typical five-person crew spreads only 8 cubic yards of bagged mulch in an hour.
Currently most of the company’s customers are people who live in estate homes, condominiums or planned developments because delivery is limited to 10 cubic yards or more. That’s more mulch than you think — a typical pickup truck holds about 3 cubic yards.
One of the gardeners who does just that is Ted Campbell of Boca Raton. He saw the colored mulch first at Boca’s Mayfair condominium and had to have it. It’s been down in his yard almost two months.
“When you normally put mulch down it looks great at first and then looks terrible a few months later,” Campbell says. “This color stays and it looks beautiful. If it starts to look faded, you just move some of the mulch on the bottom to the top. I am as thrilled as I can be. It makes the greenery just pop. It makes the color explode.”
You can get a similar punch of color from Mountain Magic and Yardcare lava rock from Mountain West Colorado Aggregate in Rexburg, Idaho. The lava rock, mined from deep volcanic cones in the western United States, comes in red, black and gold. No artificial chemicals or environmentally destructive dyes are used. It sells for $3.29 to $6.29 a cubic foot and comes in either pebble or nugget sizes.
In Florida, where it typically sells for $3.29 a cubic foot, this works out to $88.83 a cubic yard. But that’s not as pricey as it seems. Since it doesn’t break down, it doesn’t need to replaced.
“The color you see when you open the bag is the color it stays. It won’t fade,” says company vice president Alan Meudt. “You put down bark one season and it fades. Lava rock will not disintegrate and will not fade under the hottest sun.”
Florida and Michigan are the two biggest markets, Meudt says. Other states with high demand include Illinois, Wisconsin and California.
Although the company started marketing the product in the 1950s, Meudt says lava rock wasn’t pushed until recently. Two years ago, the company found a gold lava cone. Now that there are more colors, Meudt says, people are starting to mix them in their gardens.
