How to Spread Mulch

We look for bare spots where nothing is growing and then we take the mulch and just spread it thinly over the bare spot, not to thick because if we put a very thick load on it like this one (pointing to a pile of mulch on a bare spot), nothing would grow. If the Juniper mulch is too thick, nothing will grow under it. So we want to spread this in a way that is about half an inch to three quarters of an inch of mulch here so the water can still seep through and the plants have a chance to grow up. So what we do here is to try and the get the native grasses to grow back here. The native grasses are not the same as the grasses you grow on your lawn because native grasses are clump grasses. It's not a continuous meadow, but it is one clump of grass after another. They get bigger and bigger when they get enough food and soil these little grasses you see here they can grow seven to eight feet high. So what we try to do is to get the meadows back to like they were in the beginning one-hundred fifty, one-hundred sixty years ago when the first settlers came in, they found high grasses here, grasses seven, eight feet high, a man on a horse could barely see over the grasses. Some spots you can see where the grasses are higher, waving in the wind that is what they called this area ten, "The Rolling Hills", because the wind was blowing in the high grasses and it looked just was beautiful. A man on a horse was barely able to look over the grasses. That is what we are trying to do here at our nature preserve, bring back nature to the way it was before the erosion washed the soil away and before the caleche came out. That is the reason we use the Juniper mulch it's free, it does not cost us anything. We don't want to remove all the cedars, we never remove all and we don't do it with a bulldozer because a bulldozer would destroy what we have here. We do it by hand and we do it carefully, but we can prove here that it really works and over time your property will look better and better.