Creating New Beds

This morning garden question I go was how to create a mulched area bed?   Beings that we have done
this many times it's really nice to have less grass!!

We have done the tilling, the card board, the newspaper and the landscaping material routes and find the best is the newspaper route.  We have learned the landscaping material works best for pathways and driveways with rocks.  If you aren't planting in the area, use the landscaping material to suppress the weeds.

First you want to take a look at the area, decided if you are going to plant in this area and then remove all plant material if you want to keep it.  Then Yes, spray round up or any plant material killer that you might have on hand.   Any homemade killer with vinegar shouldn't be used if you plan on planting in this area.   If you are just going to put down a path or gravel then yes, use vinegar.   We use vinegar in all the driveways and walkways that have gravel as we know we will not plant in them.   Next is to allow the area to die, when you see it yellowing, you know you have got it.  If you are in a hurry then just cover with newspaper. 

Fall is a great time to put in raised garden beds or to do landscaping, which gives you time to plant
in the spring!!

We just put in a new pathway and will share the photos:

 Here is the area where the new path was going in.  First I sprayed round up to kill the grass.

  We decided to remove the edgers by the pavers to use
in the yard to make the area look clearly divided.  But left the edgers to keep the gravel in the area. Once the grass was yellow we took a flat shovel and removed the yellowing grass.

As you can see we used landscape material on some of the area as we laid the pavers down.   I recommend sand next but in this area we chose not to do the sand as it was
really flat.  I really wanted to do a row of three pavers but this works for the other party helping whom decided to cut the pavers we needed.   So since we didn't do the whole area in pavers mulch was the choice to fill in the area.  We also topped the pavers with sand to fill in the cracks between the pavers.

Let's talk mulch now, when we do the whole yard it takes two
truck full to get the whole area mulched.  It can get pretty spendy if you use a lot of much.  For smaller areas I would do the Lowe's of Home Depo bags of mulch.  Make sure it's a wood product not the rubberized stuff.   You will understand when you start to plant the area.  If you have questions let me know and I'll help!