I personally don't use compost as a mulch. Normally I use another layer of 'mulch material' over that. I wouldn't leave it uncovered, mostly because I would think you would get a lot of weeds sprouting in it. Even if it's just what blows in and lands on it. But since I've never done that, that's just a guess. I wouldn't use municipal compost. I garden organically, so I'm used to avoiding a lot of things that other gardeners might use. I have neighbors who put all kinds of things on their lawns and put their grass clippings out for the city pick up every week and considering how few people garden organically, I think the majority of people are really uninformed and unconcerned about what they are using on their grass. If it were just leaves that were composted with tree branches, I'd use it in a heartbeat. I sympathize with you, because I'm not a fan of that red mulch either. If I had that situation, I would probably be patient and when I could afford to buy more mulch, I would add just a very thin layer of shredded bark mulch or pine bark fines over the red mulch just to make it look better cosmetically. Maybe just do the front foundation beds and as you have finances to buy more, do the rest and that should require a lot less mulch to do that. edit: I like buying mulch in bags and as I use them I get a few more to keep on hand. I have a local nursery who I've bought mulch in bulk from that I was very happy with, after a few deliveries that I wasn't so happy with from other companies. I didn't want to get another large delivery this year, because I needed less and I asked and they actually bag up their own mulch and sell it that way. And they were willing to sell it to me for the bulk price which was a little cheaper. It's very fresh and just the right color and consistency and lasted a long time the last time I got it. Hopefully you can find somewhere like that. This post was edited by prairiemoon2 on Mon, Jun 30, 14 at 13:25

I would not till or disturb the soil. There are dormant weed and grass seeds in the soil that will sprout if you till. I would like you to realize that the best long term solution is not going to happen overnight. If you plant wildflowers, and do it correctly, it will take about two to three years before it looks like a nice wildflower patch. Patience when working with wildflowers will pay off. Before you plant anything, You will need to kill what is growing there now, so it doesn't out compete your wildflower seeds. I probably would wait until the existing stuff starts not to be dormant....and then spray it with roundup. Round up works while the plants are actively growing, so if they are dormant right now - its not going to do much .... A couple weeks after the roundup application, mow any plant residue left very very short... follow the mowing with light raking to scarify the soil, but don't disturb the soil too much. After mowing and raking, then apply a quality wildflower septic mix from a reputable native plant nursery. Do not buy a can of seeds from a big box retail or hardware store. Reputable native plant nurseries have a pre made mix specifically for septic systems. You may want to roll the seed to get good soil contact but that would be hard on the side slopes. So you can probably skip that part. I would cover the seed, especially on the side slopes with an erosion control blanket like North American Green S150. The blanket gets tacked into the soil and will degrade over time. The blanket will hold the soil on your side slopes until the time that your wildflowers get established. The blanket also acts as a mulch, preventing windborn weed seeds from getting established, and it helps moderate soil moisture and temperature which will help your seeds germinate. You may want to water it a few times. Do not expect any significant growth the first year. In fact I would probably keep it weed wacked to about six inches or so, the first growing seasons to keep anything from going to seed. It helps keep weeds from multiplying and it doesn't hurt the wildflowers. I just use a mower set real high, but it would be hard to do that on a slope. good luck.

Pam, To some extent, the W-M stores here have always had the plants and bulbs that can be planted in cool weather on store shelves in January, but it used to be at the end of January. Now they start popping up just as soon as they can clear one aisle or half an aisle of Christmas merchandise. I usually notice them them in the stores shortly after New Year's Day. At first it is a couple of things. I think this year the first things they had were glads, daylily roots and cannas. Since cannas overwinter in the ground here, I'm not surprised to see them in the stores but I wouldn't plant cannas into cold wet ground when we still are having nighttime lows in the teens and twenties. There's a difference in how much cold an established canna can endure underground versus a new one that's not hardened off. Keep in mind, though, that I generally shop at Wal-Mart 20 miles to my south in Gainesville, TX, and less frequently at Wal-Mart 25 miles to my north in Ardmore, OK. It does make a bit of a difference. With most cool-season gardening products, the Gainesville store can be 2 to 4 weeks ahead of the Ardmore store. I suspect Gainesville's supplies are shipped more on a schedule for Dallas-Fort Worth and Ardmore's might be shipped more on a schedule similar to OKC's. Already, the home depot in Gainesville has containerized fruit trees and they were unloading their seed displays and gardening stuff when Tim and I were in their on Tuesday buying a roll of field fencing for the new garden out back. I expect that if I pop in there today or tomorrow, they'll have everything out on the shelves like Wal-Mart does. I usually find about half my seed potatoes at Wal-Mart and the other half at Tractor Supply Company. TSC usually has some of the varieties recommended for OK, like Norkota, that other stores don't. Sometimes Lowe's or Home Depot has some potato varieties that are not on the list of recommended varieties, not that there's anything wrong with that. Pretty much any potato variety I've planted here has done well as long as I planted it early enough to beat the heat. Sometimes you just have to ignore the zones. Sure, we are zone 7 but we are an erratic zone 7. We have occasional days when the high temps hit the 80s in February and March and the 90s in April, but still might have an occasional freezing night in late April or early May. In 2007 we had pretty decent weather in winter and spring and a lot of folks in my area planted early. By early April I had tomato plants and pepper plants that were 1-2' tall and some of the tomato plants already had fruit. Then came the big cold spell that brought us snow, sleet and two weeks of very cold temperatures. As I recall, from around April 6th through the 17th or 18th we had a lot of freezing nights. Our Mesonet station mostly recorded temps right at or right above freezing, but I am in a microclimate that consistently goes a good bit colder in spring, and I think we were in the upper 20s and low 30s for most of that period. My tomatoes already were caged so there was no easy way to cover them. In the two days before the cold spell hit, I built temporary, hastily-thrown together hoop houses (and sorry-looking things they were too) over 7 raised beds that were 4' wide x 35' long, most of which were filled with tomato cages 6' tall. I put 5-gallon buckets of water in them to serve as solar collectors, putting one bucket in between every two tomato plants, and I just worked like a maniac to get a little hoop house over each individual bed. I used clear 4 mm and 6mm plastic, a boat tarp, any every other bit of plastic I could scrape up and saved all my plantings, but it took a ridiculous amount of effort. I also mulched them heavily with straw and hay right before I put the plastic covers over the beds. Last year I planted my tomato plants at the exact same time as I had in 2007 and barely had to cover them with row cover at all--maybe on 2 or 3 nights, and it ended up not freezing or frosting on those nights but I had covered them out of an abundance of caution, and largely because of my memories of 2007 and 2008, which also was warm very early in the late but then had a killing freeze/hard frost the first week in May. So, you never know what to expect here in January-May because anything can happen, and it usually does. June through August are easy to predict....hot, sunny, dry. The small amount of offerings the stores have here in January quickly become a flood. Within a week or two of the first appearance of live plant material on the shelves, the display that had filled the endcap of a row that first week suddenly fills an aisle or two, with seed potatoes, onion sets, shallots, asparagus roots, bareroot strawberries, many more types of flower corms, tubers, roots, etc. Each week there's more and more. By late February, you'd think it was late April from the looks of the shelves in the gardening section. Prior to 2009, I had to drive to the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex to find the early tomato plants from Bonnie Plants to put into containers in mid- to late-February. Then, in 2010 some of the stores closer to us---as close as Denton---got the plants in during the first week in February. Even for the D-FW area, that really is too early. Stores can make it work if they remember to take the plants inside at night if temps will drop low enough that floating row cover won't save them from freezing. The year that Cowboys Stadium hosted the Super Bowl, which I think was 2010, we had snow arrive after many stores had those early tomato plants and every single store left them outside in the snow and let them freeze. What were they thinking? If a retailer is going to carry warm-season transplants in February, they'd better be prepared to carry them inside if snow or sub-freezing temps are forecast. Some stores do use row covers, but the row covers won't protect them on bitterly cold nights. In 2011 the Wal-Mart in Gainesville had tiny tomato plants inside the store the last week in January, but I was worried they weren't big enough and would need to be hardened off so still drove to Grapevine or Southlake, TX, to get the larger Bonnie Plants tomatoes in 5" peat pots because they were larger and were hardened off. It seems to me that ever since more and more people began veggie gardening around 2008-2009, the stores push harder and harder to get transplants into the stores earlier and earlier. I am not sure how good of an idea that is. It irritates me enough to see swimsuits in stores in January or February or winter coats in August, but plants just cannot be safely pushed too far ahead of their natural season. Experienced gardeners may buy a few things very early but they know how much cold remains in a typical year, and they know to shelter and protect early plantings. I always am concerned that new gardeners will think that if the plants are in the stores then they can be planted in the ground now, which isn't necessarily true. On Monday or Tuesday when we were in Gainesville, not only did the W-M store have the bulbs and stuff inside, they had bundles of onion plants outside, and transplants of winter veggies and a few herbs that I wouldn't even think of putting in the ground now. Our weather see-saws back and forth so much that sometimes it is hard to decide when it is safe to plant. Yesterday it was 67 degrees and sunny here and just as gorgeous of a January day as you dare hope for. Overnight it dropped to 26 degrees and we woke up to heavy fog at our house. I feel like I had a spring day followed by a winter night and early morning. Yet, today likely will be as nice as yesterday and then a cold front comes through and tomorrow our high temp will be 20 degrees lower than today's. I'll use onions as an example of how variable planting dates can be. I have found onion plants in a store in Fort Worth as early as January 1st, bought some, brought them home and planted them and got a great harvest from them even though I put them in the ground a good 6 weeks early. In other years, I have planted between 2 and 6 weeks late because it was very cold here and very wet and I still have lost the onion plants to the combination of cold, wet soil and cold nighttime lows. It is impossible to do anything other than guess when to plant because you have no idea what the weather will do after you plant. Right now is a good time to do soil prep, which is good for me, because I'm working on a new garden area out back of the barn-style garage. I have wanted to enlarge the veggie garden by making a new garden in this space since 2010, but 2010 was too snowy, wet and cold, and 2011 and 2012 were drought-plagued. You cannot break ground if it is as hard as concrete. So, having had recent rains but not in flooding amounts, the soil is soft enough to work but only ever-so-slightly damp, not wet. I hope to work out there every day this week. With no rain in the 7-day forecast, it seems likely I'll get my wish. I also hope to get the big garden ready to plant this week. Then it is just a matter of watching the temperatures and deciding when it feels safe to plant. I may start some seeds inside this week. I need to go a little more research and see what the models are showing for February. Yesterday someone on Wunderground mentioned models showing some very warm temperatures in February, which made my heart sing. I just wish that I could be sure that March wouldn't turn back freezing cold again. Dawn

Gardens take time! Some people on here have a traditional set up.Installed raised beds,put in a ton of well chosen plants,good bagged soil,installed irrigation and had an up and running garden in a very short time(2yrs).I'm impressed with that! However, that's a very expensive route to gardening. Nothing wrong with it if you have the money or the inclination. That said, I don't have that kind of money so I understand your concern about expense. I make my own mulch from kitchen scraps,composted leaves(collected around the neighborhood) and my 2 pet hens. For plants,I trade and swap plants,ask for cuttings and collect seeds. I have home made rain barrels and no installed irrigation here. My water bill is usually lower than my neighbors with sod. My plants are native or adapted (with a few exceptions in containers) I chose the bulk of my plants from TX smartscape's list and tend toward aggressive plants in the areas away from my house. I also did a bog for plants that like things contiually moist. My garden will look like it's been planned out and ready to go in about 5 yrs. Twice as long,plus some, than traditional installed beds. I can give you a list of plants you can't kill if you try! If people on here say,"I hate this plant! It's EVERYWHERE! I CAN'T kill this (insert insulting word)plant!!! Help! I know I have a low water winner! LOL! Here's a few...remember once these flowers are in they will be VERY difficult to erradicate! Ruellia,Wood violets,Maximillian Sunflowers,Obedient plant,frog's fruit, yellow hardy iris,blue hardy iris,tropical sage(coccinia salvia I did manage to kill this tho....sad.), TX native wildflower mix from Native American Seed(Mex hat,blanket flower,lemon mist etc...) Mexican marigold(I think),Spiderwort, Cannas,winecups,tomatoes(surprise! these guys volunteered all over!), sunflowers,cross vine(not aggressive but it didn't need it to hold my hand either),morning glories and moonflower vine, datura(poisonous), and lots of ornamental trees to provide dappled shade. On my hell strip (street sidewalk area) Evening primrose,hardy yellow iris, frog's fruit and iron weed hopefully)Evening primrose is HARDY. I wouldn't put it anywhere but a hell strip. I also did Mint in containers and the mint grew out of the bottom!!! You gotta keep an eye on mint and Evening primrose.PJ