Calculating How Much Mulch You Need

Hi, my name is Jill and I work for Scotts in the Consumer Service department and I’m here today to talk about how much mulch to buy.  If you’re like me, figuring out how much mulch to use can be very daunting, so I’m here to give you a visual because it does help me.  Math was never my forte so square footage is always confusing.  So we have a plot here to give you a visual of how much mulch does one bag cover.

Here on the back of your bag, it does give you coverage as recommended, and for every 24 square feet, you’re going to buy three bags.  Every 48 square feet, it would be six bags.  Every 72 square feet, nine bags, and for every 120 square feet, fifteen bags, and this would be the recommended for making it the depth of 3 inches.

Here we have marked out with the yellow stakes an 8 square foot area.  One 2 cubic foot bag of mulch at 3 inches depth would cover this area, so we’re going to show you what 3 inches in mulch looks like.

On my little measuring stick here, I have 1, 2, and 3 inches marked.  They are marked at the bottom of this so when I stick this in here, we are exactly 3 inches deep.  At this depth, this will naturally crowd out and keep out any weeds in your flower beds.

After I’ve done all this math and everything, then I find out, you know what?  I can make it even easier for you: we have a mulch calculator!  Go to Scotts.com and check it out.