Are you planting seeds or do you have seedlings already up. Your describing a seed bed.

Seeds may have a difficult time pushing thru hardwood mulch. You should consider using straw applied lightly.

Landscape rock is not what you would use for seeds or seedlings. Organic materials that biodegrade are what you should use.

When seedlings gain some height (6"+) you could continue using straw or you could carefully place hardwood mulch between your trees.

I hope this answers your question(s).

Dax

Thx Dax, but to clarify I'm simply referring to the l/s beds with a wide variety of plantings.

Then you're fine with whatever you choose. Just remember that once you add a lot of rock, it's very-very difficult to remove... and if you were to continue adding rock as necessary for upkeep, the other rocks will have settled into the soil. Digging in soil laden with rock/pebble etc- is something you could always have avoided from the get-go.

Aesthetically if it's landscape pebble/hardscape cover that you with for... then use it. Pebble/rock heat up and reflects onto your plants as-well. It will dry up your soil much more rapidly. Reflection onto plants can also burn the foliage. It's something a more seasoned gardener would be more capable of controlling the 'environment'.

Dax

now you tell us where you are.. in a post it doesnt matter in ... lol ...

mulch is an aesthetic consideration ... what ever pleases you ...

dave is one of the few ... and frankly i would never haul stone for any purpose ...

i used to use.. few wood chips from a tree trimmer ... key word.. free ...

whats that tree on the corner of the house... some weird design by you ... or ma nature doing its thing?

ken

mulch is an aesthetic consideration ... what ever pleases you ...

==>>> gal ... you cant take half of a comment and argue about that half ...

given that a mulch does what gal lists ... and many things can do such ...

THEN .... WHICHEVER PLEASES YOU is what you choose ... [though if you choose stained wood chips ... i wont respect you ... lol .. no red to match brick ... and never black ...]

BTW .... rock can be a problem ... in that it can hold and retain heat.. late into the night ... and that is usually a recovery period from the heat of the day ... not that it cant be used... you just have to take such into consideration ...

and never use landscape fabric under anything ... [just in case you were thinking about such under stone ...]

ken

Ken, Black wood chips can be a nice look.

I'm wondering where you picked up the idea that seasoned gardeners use rock as mulch. Maybe....if you want a Japanese Garden look or perhaps live near water where rounded rocks would be plentiful and attractive. I suppose Gravel is "rocks" . All these inorganic pose specific challenges: weeds...once they get in they're murder to get out. God save your fingers and wrists from digging in rocks; weight: getting them onto the site and handling their distribution; changing your mind about mulching materials. You'd have to remove the rocks or gravel and then you encounter the weight and disposal problems. It's a very distinctive look and you should be sure rock mulch suits the landscape. Finally, being inorganic it won't feed the soil or the plants because most rocks won't decompose in your lifetime.

The aesthetics of dyed woodchips are another topic and deserves its own thread. We could derail this thread if we get into it here.

Is it all about aesthetics? Any issue with the dyes themselves towards the health of the plants?

Black compost looks good. Dyed black mulch looks fake and bleaches with time. It also might be a bit hot if heat in the summer is an issue.

Rocks for a mulch belongs in the desert or sub-alpine and alpine scree. Here in the Seattle area, it's a disaster and, for the most part, doesn't work. I did a lot of makeovers in almost 40 years of landscaping and had to deal with rocks as a mulch many times. It was always a mess and a lot of work to rectify.

Mike

I'm wondering when a study out of Minnesota-how's that for professional documentation!-showed far fewer cultural benefits to mulch than say, a guy like me would have expected. To wit, this study showed no improvement in moisture status under mulch, no increased growth rate, no improvement to root system architecture....you get the point. Virtually every aspect of what we-myself included-like to say about using mulch was rebutted by this study. Too bad the guy posting this can't remember where it was published, etc!

But that is one study. I continue to believe in mulch, for all the reasons listed above. That is, I'm not sure I'm buying this particular study.

+oM

Yeah, and I think it would be important to read the details of the study. For example, it's incontrovertible that mulch can help retain moisture already in the soil. But mulch can also interfere with moisture even making it to the soil in the first place, especially organic mulches which can, themselves, absorb water.

FWIW, this was a real thing I'm talking about-a peer-reviewed study. I was surprised at some of the conclusions, but the source seemed legit. It would have had to have been some professional hort. or arboricultural journal, not Good Housekeeping!

+om

DeanW45, good point! Putting down mulch when the soil is dry and it won't be watered for the season is a recipe for death in some situations, a setback more often. I always wait until the ground is saturated before applying mulch, and learned the hard way. We've had significant rain in the last week or two and my woodchip piles are only damp just a few inches down. Mulches can absorb a lot of water.

Mike

I believe it, Tom, and I apologize if it seemed like I was doubting you. My issue is with the study, where I think the devil is in the details, as it is with most scientific studies.

The real significance of organic mulch is when it's been down for a few years with a couple of top dressings. Then it starts to mix with the soil and the roots grow into it a bit.

Mike

I agree, Mike. Indeed, the dividing line between "mulch" and "soil" can be pretty fine. Some people plant things in what is really just finely shredded pine bark mulch. So I suppose the actual size of the mulch particles is yet another variable to consider when trying to evaluate the effectiveness of organic mulches...

I was an early advocate of covering the soil with organic mulches. By the mid to late 1970s, I would never intentionally not do so. Of course, many days have since passed, and I've had the opportunity to see two general trends take place. One is, what I call the annual mulching. Landscapes that get almost no reasonable care at all will nevertheless have great quantities of wood chips or bark spread around, on a yearly basis. That is, whether they need it or not. This has come to be seen by many as some kind of necessity. Even a bed of truly crap plants will have that minty freshness of new bark applied around them, even as not one person takes pruners in hand to rid the plant(s) of dead branches, etc. I'm sure you've all seen this.

The second broad trend is what I call "woodchip gardens", plantings so sparsely designed that it seems the "designer's" intent was to showcase the mulch. This, my friends, is not landscaping, but some kind of monkey see-monkey do game. Then, as these incredibly overdone mulch layers are colonized by beneficial decay fungi, the entire thing begins to form a plate of impervious mycelium-colonized material. Good for placement in a compost heap, but of no value to the poor plants struggling to grow there. Still, I continue to believe in mulch, but not for its own sake, and not absent-mindedly replenished based on a calendar date or some equally meaningless point of data. And for those situations where one wishes to gain new recruits via volunteer plants showing up in the garden/planting, no mulch is best. My dear late grandmother-bless her soul-was an extremely competent and creative gardener all her life, but could not and would not allow for the ground to be covered. She actively and purposefully wanted the many hardy perennials, etc. to spread their progeny around, and she knew that for that, seed to soil contact was required.

+oM

I consider bark or woodchip mulch a temporary cover until the groundcovers take over.

+om, your Grandmother must have done a lot of weeding! Perennials aren't the only plant that reseeds. ;-)

My younger brothers and I used to work in my Grandfather's garden on a farm north of Spokane, Wa. (Zone 5) The soil was fine volcanic ash. All the garden plants were planted the old fashion way...long straight rows, instead of raised beds. Lotsa weeds! We used dust as a mulch to inhibit the loss of soil moisture through evaporation by capillary action. I have spent a lot of time pushing a hand cultivator to make the ground dusty. The garden was usually the size of two city lots. My Grandfather lived with us and my brothers and I were his slaves. I'm surprised I have a love of plants after all that.

Mike

Ha, yeah that can be punishing. I suppose her gardens had weeds. I know I used to help do stuff there all the time, but not weeding in particular. To some degree, it depends on location. But in any case, that was her deal, not exactly mine. I still use mulch for the vast majority of plantings. Even annual display beds and such are made much more doable with mulch, the problem otherwise indeed being weeds. The scenarios I outlined above represent mulching run amok, and I'll bet these things can be seen everywhere. Forgot to mention one other spinoff from all the woody debris being spread about-lots of interesting macro fungi, ie mushrooms! But still I maintain, somewhere we turned a corner where some folks started to view mulch and mulching as an end in and of itself.

+oM

I hear you there! I had a garbage man tell me he handled more bark mulch that I did as an installation landscaper. He said a lot of people rake up old mulch and replace it with new. What the Heck! Why not just put a cosmetic coating on the top of the old? Jeesh! Use less mulch too. Cheaper.

Better yet, plant groundcovers in the mulch. That's sometimes faster than putting mulch around the groundcovers.

Mike

I really like the point about groundcover as mulch, and I've got a bed with two cryptomeria and a Cupressus arizonica var. glabra that have strawberry plants serving that function. But I also designed it that way because neither the cryptomeria nor cupressus need much water now that they are establshed, and I felt like the competition for moisture with the strawberry plants (which are essentially weeds with nice fruit) wouldn't be a big deal. I would be nervous using a plant, especially a water-loving plant, in other beds.

Then there are the things like Lavender, Agastache, and some others that actually resent any organic mulch material being applied around them. Of course, those are specialized cases, and do not negate the benefits even I continue to associate with woodchip or shredded bark mulches. Like Mike said earlier, if one can think of mulching as a more or less temporary step to getting woody (and even non-woody_ plants off to a good start-we're talking perhaps some years-and envision a garden or planting as eventually consisting primarily of plants, I think we'll be off to a good composition. I do much design work for the municipality here, but there's no rhyme or reason sometimes as to who does what. So, a person who is a quasi-boss of mine-that's confusing and beside the point-does do our traffic roundabouts. He said to me once, early in that game, that these plantings were supposed to be boring, and man, let me tell you, he's succeeded! So over here, one single clump of feather reed grass, over yonder, maybe eight feet away, a single shrub rose. Then, some daylily, etc......but by and large, you're looking at woodchips! I hate that. But I still like using organic mulches.

BTW, up at my tree farm, where we've planted perhaps 10,000 seedlings and plugs by now, I started initially with a cadillac planting method whereby I'd actually mulch around these tiny things! I have to laugh at the utter impracticality of it all, now that we've gone into high gear with machine-planting, etc. So, what have been the results? Well, those initial plantings, circa 2008, are now twenty foot tall trees. And the ones that got much less care at time of planting? They're doing great also!

+om