DIY vs Blown Mulch: Which is the Winner?

If you are responsible for landscape maintenance at a school, daycare, or non profit, what do you do when your property needs mulching? You might be tempted to install landscape mulch yourself. You could get a group of volunteers and make a community service day out of it. After all, spreading mulch doesn’t require any special skills, so it seems easy when compared to other “do it yourself” projects. You might also be thinking about your budget and how doing it yourself could save your organization money. Before you make your decision, you need to think about the true costs.

Consider each of the following:

#1: Physical Effort

Installing mulch yourself requires a lot of physical effort. First, you have to head to the lawn and garden center or hardware store to buy your mulch. Depending on the size of your project, this could be dozens of bags to load, haul to your site, and unload. Then, you have to distribute the bags around your project site and hope you get them in the right places.

If you decide to get a bulk mulch delivery, the hauling and unloading is easier. But then your hard work really begins. You’ve got to scoop into buckets or wheelbarrows, haul to your site, dump, and repeat. This back-and-forth hauling can take days. Hot weather makes the work even more difficult. Soon, your team is working slower and your volunteers are finding reasons to leave early. Plus, there can be big liability concerns with volunteers doing this kind of labor.

With blown mulch, our professional installation crew arrives at your site with the mulch already loaded onto their truck or trailer. It’s equipped with powerful blowers that allow them to spread the mulch using long, flexible hoses. It’s like a huge vacuum in reverse.

With this technology, the machines do the hard work. A small crew can spread mulch throughout your project site easily and with very little physical effort. This makes for a happier, safer work site and reduces the chance of injuries.

Winner: Blown mulch

#2: Time to Complete Installation

With a do-it-yourself mulch project, you’d better plan for a large time investment. People can’t spread mulch very fast, especially if they’re not used to this kind of work. A larger crew of volunteers can make the project go faster, but then you’ll need more equipment for them to use.

A crew using a mulch blower can spread mulch much faster. In fact, a blown-in installation method can spread more than 50 yards of mulch in two hours. This cuts days off your project and lets you get back to enjoying your property faster.

Winner: Blown mulch

#3: Property Disruption

When you’re installing mulch manually, you’ll have to account for disruption to your property. First, there’s the pile of mulch (or stacks of bags) in your parking lot. Then, there are all the vehicles of the volunteers/crew. You’ll end up losing much of your parking lot for the duration of the project.

Then you have people dragging mulch through your landscaping. Wheelbarrows leave ruts on your lawn. Extra mulch spills out of the wheelbarrow and makes a mess. Plus the traffic blocks people trying to use your property.

If your mulch is for a playground or fenced area, you may have issues with access. Depending on the configuration of your site, you may need to remove equipment or dismantle fencing to allow your volunteers to spread playground mulch effectively. This also requires you to try to keep users off your playground until the project is finished.

Blown mulch doesn’t have these problems. With blown mulch, our installers bring the mulch to your site with them. A small installation crew places your mulch exactly where it needs to go with no impact to your lawns or landscaping. When they’re done, they take any remaining mulch with them. Your visitors will see your beautiful landscaping and nothing else.

Our installers use long, flexible tubes instead of wheelbarrows or heavy equipment. This allows them to go over fences and under equipment with ease. There’s no need to remove anything. You can have a beautifully mulched playground in a very short amount of time, allowing users to enjoy it right away.

Winner: Blown Mulch

#4: Estimating and Purchasing

When you’re installing mulch manually, it’s difficult to accurately estimate how much mulch you need to buy. If you don’t buy enough, you’ll be heading back to the store or scheduling a second mulch delivery. If you buy too much, then you’ve got to figure out what to do with the leftovers. This can be costly for a small business or nonprofit.

With blown mulch, our installers will ensure your job will have a complete, accurate amount of mulch installed. These professionals have done hundreds of projects and can calculate exactly how much mulch you’ll need. If there’s any left over, it remains on the truck and the crew takes it with them. There’s much less waste and no last-minute rushes back to the hardware store to buy more expensive mulch.

Winner: Blown Mulch

Blown Mulch Is The Clear Winner

Once you consider all the costs of doing mulch yourself, it’s clear that blown mulch is the winner. Ready to get started on blown mulch for your project? Fill out the form to get connected with a professional installer today.