Benefits of Offering Colored Mulch to Your Clients

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It’s Not Just Because Mulch Looks Nice

Spring is the time of year when homeowners get their lawns back to pristine condition, plant their summer gardens and get trees, shrubs and flowers looking good for the coming warm months. A key part of creating a beautiful and healthy yard is adding mulch around trees and plants, which adds obvious curb appeal to your customers’ homes. Mulch has a myriad of benefits for the health of your customers’ plants, too. According to ArborDay.org, “A newly planted tree’s best friend is mulch,” and small plants and shrubs like it too! Mulch can protect plants’ roots, improve soil and keep gardens thriving. As a provider of these essential landscaping tools, it is important to know the benefits of mulch and the products available to create the aesthetic your customers crave. Knowledge is power, and understanding the many benefits of mulch gives you greater selling power to your customers and clients. Additionally, offering colored mulch, one of the hottest products on the market, is a great way to keep and add clients. Keep reading to learn six benefits of mulch and how to maximize your profits by selling the most beautiful colored mulch products on the market.

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Five Benefits of Offering Colored Mulch to Your Clients

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When you use an organic material such as wood chips and bark as mulch, it decomposes over time, adding much-needed nutrients to the soil. When plants grow in nature, they have the benefit of nutrients entering the soil from decomposing organic material on the ground from fallen leaves, broken twigs and dead plants going back into the earth. Mulch that’s made of organic material serves to imitate the natural detritus of the forest floor, effectively replacing the nutrients that plants would benefit from in nature. Because plants cannot grow without absorbing these nutrients through the soil, it’s imperative to encourage these nutrients to form in the soil. Your customers can add them artificially, through fertilizers, or naturally through decomposing organic matter. These slowly decomposing mulch pieces encourage earthworms to move into the soil, further aiding in decomposition and adding their own nutrients to the soil. Earthworms facilitate the cycling of nutrients through their waste, and they are a necessary component of any healthy garden. Earthworm waste, also called castings or vermicomposting, comes from the earthworm eating the organic matter, clay and silt in the soil. The castings are full of some of the most important

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Five Benefits of Offering Colored Mulch to Your Clients

nutrients that plants need, and they are hard to replicate. In addition to the nutrients from their waste, earthworms tunnel and move around in the soil, creating air space and loosening up the soil, allowing plants’ roots ample space to grow. In addition to adding the beneficial decomposing matter to your soil, mulch prevents that precious, high-quality soil from eroding away. Even light wind, rain and snow can cause your plants’ nutritious soil to wash or blow away; even things like wildlife and children playing in the dirt can take with them the important topsoil that you worked hard to cultivate for your garden. When you have a protective layer of mulch covering it, the natural elements and living creatures will be unable to disrupt your soil without going through a lot of effort. Preventing erosion is key to keeping your soil healthy and full of nutrients for your plants, and mulch is one of the most effective ways of doing that.

BENEFIT 1IMPROVES SOIL QUALITY

BENEFIT 2PROTECTS FROM TEMPERATURE EXTREMES

BENEFIT 3RETAINS SOIL MOISTURE

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Five Benefits of Offering Colored Mulch to Your Clients

One of mulch’s most important benefits is that it protects your customers’ plants’ roots from extreme temperature variations. A 2- to 4-inch layer of mulch provides the right amount of insulation to protect from the extreme heat of the summer and the frosts of winter. Even during times of slow growth, plants and their roots still need to be protected from the elements, and mulch is a great way to offer that protection.

One of the benefits of T.H. Glennon’s liquid colorant products is the option to include our mold-resistant additive. This additive will help increase the shelf life of your colored mulch. The Mold Resistant Additive is specifically formulated to reduce the heat buildup of your mulch. The additive works to reduce the heat in your wood mulch, while decreasing the ability for mold and fungus to grow. Delivering consistently colored mulch is important to your customers and will help increase your repeat customers for many years to come.

Because mulch helps insulate your customers’ gardens from temperature extremes, it also helps the soil process the moisture it receives. Adding mulch to the garden can lower your customers’ water bills because less water can evaporate from the soil, allowing your plants to absorb moisture more efficiently. In addition, mulches made of organic materials are porous, so they help retain moisture, which your plants’ roots can then take in when they need it. Keeping your plants’ roots moist is especially essential during the hot summer months and in dry climates, and mulch is the most cost-effective and efficient way to do that. Also, soil that is protected by a layer of mulch can take in as much as four times more water than bare soil because of the increased presence of earthworms; this is due to the soil’s increased aeration from the tunneling of earthworms. Aerated soil absorbs water more quickly, preventing the formation of puddles that can damage plants by overwatering them. Mulch provides the optimal combination of retaining moisture but not too much moisture, which keeps your plants growing and flourishing.

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Five Benefits of Offering Colored Mulch to Your Clients

BENEFIT 4PREVENTS WEED GROWTH

BENEFIT 5CREATES A CLEAN AESTHETIC

Weeds. The gardener’s arch enemy. Anyone who wants to maintain a pristine yard with healthy plant life knows that weeds are the bane of any plant’s existence. They are pests that grow rapidly and strip the soil of the nutrients, choking your plants and taking over the garden. The great news is that a nice layer of mulch can go a long way in preventing weeds from growing. Spreading 2 to 4 inches of thick mulch helps to block the sunlight that most weeds need to grow and survive. In addition, because the soil under your mulch is moist and loose, any weeds that do manage to crack through to the surface are easy to pull out completely. Combining a thick layer of mulch with a protective weed barrier, such as ground cloth, results in a nearly impenetrable garden. Keeping weeds from overtaking your garden is integral to having happy, growing plants.

Let’s be honest, mulch looks really nice. Many of your clients will come to you wanting to add mulch to their yards simply because it creates a clean, finished appearance. Mulch adds a depth to the

appearance of flowerbeds and tree roots that your customers usually cannot get from soil alone. This is where the amazing advancements in colorant technology come in — you can offer your customers mulch in virtually any color that will match the aesthetic of their yards using T.H. Glennon’s superior mulch colorant products. We create custom colors so that you can offer your customers beautiful, uniform mulch that is the perfect color to complement their yards. How do we do it? With our high-quality liquid and powder colorants and dyes. Using T.H. Glennon Colorfast Colorants will coat each piece of wood with a specially formulated, highly pigmented liquid or powder dye. Because we have so many options, there is a mulch colorant choice for every budget and style. T.H. Glennon’s mulch

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Five Benefits of Offering Colored Mulch to Your Clients

products are eco-friendly, so they retain all the benefits of mulch while still being the most aesthetically pleasing option. In addition to being a beautiful way to fill the empty spaces in your yard, mulch has the benefit of being easy to maintain, especially when compared to other fillers like grass. Because it doesn’t grow, mulch doesn’t compete for nutrients like grass or other ground covers do.

Colorfast Liquid The Colorfast Liquids come in two options: Advanced Colorfast Liquid and Quality Colorfast Liquid. Both landscape coating product lines can be purchased with a mold-resistant additive mentioned above and or feature the delightful cedar and hemlock fragrances of natural wood. You will be able to create custom colors for your clients to match the aesthetic they are going for. The Advanced Colorfast Liquid is our premier product. It offers long-lasting color to even the most difficult wood types. By coating each surface and fiber in the wood, the Advanced Colorfast Liquid creates a beautiful, consistent, and highly pigmented mulch product that your customers will love. In addition, the color options are more diverse, including an exotic blue, grass green, and several red and brown wood tones. The Quality Colorfast Liquid is an option for the more price-conscious buyer. These lower-priced pigments still offer consistent and rich color that your clients will love. You will love the high yield and low upfront cost of these colorants.

Colorfast Powder Our Advanced Colorfast Powder and Quality Colorfast Powder offer an extremely concentrated colorant formula. These powders coat the surfaces and fibers of the wood to create gorgeous coloration that is consistent throughout the products. You and your customers will love the beautiful deep wood tones that you can choose from. Both the Advanced and the Quality Colorfast Powders have the appeal of ease of use in colder weather. Many customers want to get their yards started in the early spring or get ahead of the process by mulching in the fall. Because the Colorfast Powders do not require water, you will be able to use them in low temperatures without worrying about freezing pipes or dyes. Additionally, the powders can be applied during the grinding process, killing two birds with one stone. True to all T.H. Glennon products, our Colorfast powders offer consistent, highly pigmented, long-lasting color that your customers will love.

By helping your customers understand the benefits of mulch and how integral it is to the health of their gardens, you will be helping save them time and money in the long run. Improving their soil’s quality and making it more efficient at producing nutrients are just some of the benefits

Sources https://www.arborday.org/trees/tips/mulching.cfm http://www.doityourself.com/stry/why-mulch-6-benefits-of-mulching#b http://www.themulchmasters.com/whyMulch.html http://www.thisoldhouse.com/toh/article/0,,220008-2,00.html http://www.vegetablegardener.com/item/12820/the-importance-of-worms-in-your-home-vegetable-garden

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Five Benefits of Offering Colored Mulch to Your Clients

that your customers will enjoy when they add mulch to their landscapes. Most importantly, the T.H. Glennon colorant products provide high-quality and beautiful products that will have your customers, and their neighbors and friends, coming back year after year.