Your links: 2 Those look like they might be 2-3 years old and, being trees, will be hard to remove. Your options are mechanical or chemical. Using chemicals would leave you with stumps. Baby trees are a lot easier to deal with when they first sprout, so be on the lookout for new ones and pull ASAP before they become hard to handle.

Read what Kimmsr wrote again. It's right on the mark. "The best mulch material to use is that which you can get at the least cost..." Check things out around you. It's amazing sometimes what you will see and find and get if you ask. All my leaves get blown away in the fall, but a mile down the road my neighbours will gladly give me their leaves. One neighbour has a nice stand of pine trees. He used to rake underneath them and throw out all the needles until I asked him for them. All I do is supply the garbage bags for them and go get the bags. My neighbours on the opposite side of the road use to complain about the seaweed washing up on their beaches but now they don't since I go get it for mulching particular beds and for my compost. I collect used coffee grounds on the way home every day. The owner of the establishment where I get them from cut his organic pick-up fee by 1/2 and is most pleased to see me. The following is mulch which I created with used coffee grounds (UCGs), pine needles, and shredded leaves. The following is a photo of the gardens where it was applied. I never had to weed this area the whole season. :O) Mind you, I weeded before placing the mulch and I don't do the newpaper things to snuff any weed seeds, but placing a good 3 inches of this mulch works well. If the plants were further apart or I was not introducing new plants to the gardens all the time, then I might be inclined to put newspaper down. I must agree with those who speak negatively of landscape/weed fabric. One experience in my parents' gardens showed me that it can be more of a pain than anything else. It provides no food value to the soil and will permit rhizomaceous weeds to creep underneath until they see a way out and by that time your problem is more than you'd like.

Here goes, Bart. Lavender lass, I sure wish my garden had a few horses wandering around. Fenced from the garden, of course. That's what my property was when I bought it in 1978, a horse pasture with native alder, maple, hemlock and Doug fir. I rented a bulldozer and put in a driveway and cleared an area for a manufactured home. After that was done an acquaintance needed a place to store his bulldozer. My place was the logical choice. He said I could run it as much as I wanted as long as I kept it full of fluids. After a couple of years I had dug 12 ponds and cleared a lot of land and started growing plants for my landscaping business, focusing on the not so common plants and buying the more common ones wholesale. I propagated them from seeds and cuttings. Made a lot of trades too. Along the way I kept planting trees and shrubs for myself and slowly phasing out the nursery beds. Most of them went through several moves before they found a permanent home. Now, after 35 years, I'm doing a lot of editing. That means cutting lower branches off some trees and sawing down others. I'm even turning the larger rhododendrons in to trees by pruning them to look like trees. Lately I'm concentrating on planting more groundcovers and enlarging and redoing a rock garden. Every so often almost every part of the garden needs a reshuffle. That's the fun part! I really enjoy my neighbor's horse in the pasture next door. He also raises a couple of Angus each summer for beef. Lavender lass, there IS country on this side of the state. ;-) Mike...from Peone Prairie near Mt. Spokane

You pull them as they appear or otherwise manually remove them. btw, if you have healthy population of lizards and frogs, then you should not have many worries about spiders. And they can occupy a whole lot of things other than mulch..........every time I turn over a rock pile here or disturb any edging stones, spiders run out. What makes you think there aren't plenty in your current rock mulch? Also, if you are using household vinegar for weed control, it will not change the soil pH to any measurable degree. It is an organic ompound that breaks down almost immediately with water and soil contact. Even horticultural vinegar breaks down rapidly. And the point is to spray on the weed foliage, not on the soil anyway :-)