SPRING CLEANING: The Finishing Touch
I wrapped up my Spring clean-ups just over a week ago (yipee!) but I just wanted to dedicate one more post to the final step of my clean-ups which I term the ‘flip and fluff’. This ‘finishing touch’ step will not only make your garden look amazing but it is a step that can come in handy at other points throughout the growing season to ‘refresh’ the look of your garden.
The ‘flip and fluff’ is pretty simple: it involves flipping the existing mulch on the beds and fluffing it up. (If you do not have mulch, cultivating the soil would be the equivalent task for you.) This process, which is often overlooked, serves three main purposes for me:
1) It gives me a chance to see how much mulch is remaining on the beds; with this information, I can gauge how much I will need to add for the season
2) It refreshes the look of the beds… a lot! It turns ‘old and tired’ into ‘new and fresh’ (even though it isn’t new… or fresh… which makes this an extremely useful ‘garden hack’.)
3) Shredded mulches tend to weave together in a layer that can repel water; every now and then, this layer needs to be broken up so that moisture can easily penetrate the mulch and reach the soil.
Mulches of different colours and textures. The fibres of shredded mulches (such as the one that appears in the centre photo) tend to weave together to form a somewhat water-repelling layer. This mulch needs to be broken up not only to refresh it’s ‘look’ but to also allow water to get through the mulch to reach the soil below.
‘Flip and Fluff’ is super-easy! The only tools required are a cultivator and your hands and you can achieve awesome results in three main steps:
1) Use the cultivator to lift the existing layer of mulch and flip it over
2) Break up the mulch (I use my hands to ‘crumble’ it and loosen it up)
3) Disperse the mulch over the bed so that it is nice and level and looks uniform (no lumps allowed!). Once again, I do this task by hand as it gives me the most control over the finished look of the bed. Some people are incredibly skilled with a cultivator and can get an amazingly smooth and uniform bed using one. I am not one of those people, so I invest in good knee pads and have become really used to seeing mulch up close!
A visual progression of flipping and fluffing the mulch in a garden bed.
If you are cultivating your beds, just a few things to note:
Be careful of plant roots: if you are working around trees and shrubs and having a hard time getting the cultivator through the soil because of root systems, then back off! Your plants will thank you for not disturbing their roots!
Be careful near perennials: don’t cultivate deeply around perennials- you can easily disturb their roots without even knowing it.
If you are allowing something to seed in an area- do not cultivate
If you have any perennial weeds (more about this in a future post)- do not cultivate. Breaking up many of these weeds can worsen your problem.
There you have it! The ‘flip and fluff’- a task that requires trial and error and a dash of finesse. Once you get into your groove and put it to work in your beds, I promise you that your efforts will be worthwhile.