Perfectly safe to use anywhere in the garden as a mulch, although it is not a look I prefer with perennials. I'd much prefer a finer textured, darker mulch for perennial beds - ideally compost - and reserve the wood chips for shrub borders or tree mulching. Or informal walkways :-)

why not ...

price is usually my ONLY determinative factor ... i used to have a couple local tree guys who would dump loads on my 5 acres ...

BUT ... not all wood chips are the same ... any chance you have a pic.. or can describe it???

some tree guys have good chippers ... that create a a uniform product which is both usable and movable ... others need new chippers.. lol ...

the bigger the chip.. the longer it will last ...

ken

Wood chips are what I use. I use shavings from the family woodshop and chips from tree trimming crews, both of which are free, important to me because I have a lot of garden space, though I need to take them as available. Or if needed I buy a delivered dump truck worth of mulch. They all weather to a grayish tan. If you don’t like the look, buy a load of leaf mulch or whatever is being sold as finish mulch and top coat it.

thanks everyone!
yeah I'm not super picky about the color I mostly want to protect the plants and improve the soil.
Ken here is the screenshot from their website it isn't a great photo haha

At that price, I'd be inclined to go with them as well :-) Here, bulk compost is 3x that cost!! But I have a rather small area to cover so cost is not a driving factor!

fyi ... if you cant drive a shovel into it... you use a garden fork ... the tines being easier to get into the pile?

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=garden+fork&t=ffcm&iax=images&ia=images

or. if its dumped on a driveway surface.. you can use a manure shovel ...

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=manure+shovel&t=ffcm&ia=products

if its delivered bone dry.. buy a tarp.. and keep it dry ... who needs it to quadruple in weight by sucking up rain water .... a couple pounds of water .. time a thousand shovel fulls.. adds up ... unless you just need the exercise ...

imo ... the NATURAL grey of old wood... is.. well.. natural ... i really never understood unnatural red ... or black ... or whatever ... yuck ...

ken

The one thing you want to pay attention to is whether there are tree diseases around and if you are putting the chips near the same type of tree. For example, Emerald Ash Borer is a minuscule insect that destroys ash trees. Hemlock scale and Woolly Adegid harm Hemlocks. We have a hemlock that died. The scale and the Adelgid probably contributed to its death. I wouldn't want chips from that tree spread around my yard, which has a hell of a lot of other hemlocks. Winter moth is a problem where we are, too.

Aesthetics aside, wood chips are a great mulch - as a matter of fact wood chips and shredded leaves are nature's own mulch. If improving the soil over the long term plus blocking weeds and preserving moisture are your goals, then you can't get anything better.

Hard to argue with Richard's assessment :-) Wood chips are considered to be a superior mulch product. And contamination by pathogens or insects is typically rather overstated.

My choice for compost is based primarily on aesthetics and a broader range of nutrients that are more readily/rapidly available.

one might suggest.. that pathogens and bugs.. need a live tree .. and by definition ... a chipped product is not alive.. the question would then be.. how long any thing might live and/or move to a close by host plant ...

this is usually avoided.. by composting the chips.. but then it would be sold as compost.. not really a mulch ...

ken

Please! Mulch is not a single product. You cannot buy mulch, no matter what they've told you. Mulch is anything that you put on top of your soil to a.) keep weeds down, b.) keep the soil moist, and c.) keep the soil cool. It drives me nuts that anyone thinks you can buy mulch. You can buy products to use as a mulch.

I'm not telling you how to think, but this is how I think. If I meet any of you in person and see your ugly mulches, I'll bite my tongue:

I really dislike the looks of a wood chip mulch since the first time I ever saw wood chip mulches were at all the McDonalds that popped up when I was a teenager. I consider it a very commercial look done by non-gardeners.

Real gardeners use leaf or compost mulches as their upper mulch.

Add nitrogen to the wood chips to offset the nitrogen robbing effect of decomposition of the wood.

Annpat - While I appreciate that you took the time to answer my inquiry quite frankly I find your post to be rather judgmental. While I am not attempting to escalate any type of interaction, I am not okay with certain things and I found your post to be intentionally antagonistic

Firstly, I understand the semantic uses of 'use as mulch' and "mulch". This is just how people speak, I don't know why it's anyone's concern. (Not for nothing if something is "used as mulch" by definition it is mulch).

Additionally, your comment about "seeing your ugly mulches" and "biting your tongue" is just plain rude. I am unsure as to why you think it is permissible to judge others and have this "holier than thou" approach.

Finally, referring to people as "real" gardeners, is again insulting and rude (and frankly doesn't make sense if you want to get all picky about semantics, all gardeners are real gardeners, they don't cease to exist because you have a problem with how they garden).

Your tone, explicit comments and implications are extremely condescending. I ask you to refrain from addressing myself, or others in this way in the future.

Kali: Don't worry about the comments from the rude and judgmental loners who occasionally drop in to try to sound authoritative, but almost always come off sounding silly, misinformed and petulant. I've also found that anyone who uses the line "Real ______ don't do _____" is usually giving "advice" that one should avoid at all costs.

The advice from Babs and Gardengal is excellent (as usual), and that's pretty much all you need to pay attention to in this thread.

Yes, I was joking, but I appreciate---now---how offensive it was. I thought I was being tongue-in-cheek about "real gardeners". I was making the comparison to McDonald's type landscapers. I'm not offering a defense other than I really didn't realize how rude I was until it was pointed out. I'm sorry. I'm often rude and I will try to refrain in the future.

However---again, no defense---people think wood chips are mulch. They aren't. They are a mulch. It's not semantics at all. It's a resurfacing---no pun intended---misunderstanding here, and people, who don't understand the difference, hear us constantly recommending mulches. I think that when we use 'wood particles' and 'mulch' interchangeably here, it's very confusing, and people are missing out on other options---often better options.

That said, I'm sorry for being so rude. I wasn't actually directing my post at anyone in particular. Someone said they got a truckload of mulch...I started typing.

annpat is about the least judgemental person you could hope to run into in the garden [unless there are planaria about]. And typically quite witty. Alas, the desert-like dry wit in that post blew right past like a dry leaf! Limitations of the written word I suppose. Too bad there are no emojis in this forum.

Off to load up my compost with moldy bread! :-P

Oh, dear tox, "Dry wit"---how sweet is that?!

(You can't imagine how relieved I am that I wasn't able to post the smiling picture of myself at the end of my post like I tried. You know, to make it look more friendly. Yikes.)

Just to be clear (in case any of you drop by my garden someday) I don't consider myself a real gardener. I used to say I'm a composter, above all, but I've changed and now I consider myself---foremost---a mulcher (a real mulcher).

Most of us here are dirt farmers - we feed the soil, the soil grows the plants. :-D

Annpat, I think you are secretly a Brit. Your meaning was completely clear to me.

Personally my favourite mulch is bread. But I'll use anything organic that costs me nothing.

Oh, no. You don't mulch with bread, you put it on your mulch pile. One good rain and it slithers through the other goodies winding around like, well, like planaria. Gobs of them.

tj

You guys are making people ill.