Many municipalities use brush collection materials to create mulch, which they supply for free to their taxpaying citizens.
On some gardening sites, users have chimed in that these free mulch sources are not safe (safe for your desired landscaping or garden results, not a human danger) for home lawn and garden use, since the wood that winds up there are often from diseased sources that get mixed in with the rest of the mulch.
Is this a legitimate risk? It seems very much like the kind of warning that might originate from a garden center store that sells much more expensive mulch.
If that is the danger of free brush-collection-sourced shredded mulch, where do commercial mulch sources get their materials, and what precautions are used to insure their comparative safety?
Some possibilities I thought of -
- No difference at all. They get their source material from pruned trees, removed trees and stuff that falls into yards from trees. Maybe they even buy the brush collected by cities that don't shred and supply mulch.
- They get all the limbs, branches and odd bits, either pre- or post-shredding from lumber mills, that trim from the main trunk of threes they are milling for lumber.
- They grow the most pristine, perfect and healthy trees themselves, just to cut them down and shred them into "pure" mulch (/sarcasm)
If anyone actually knows, generally, how that works, I'd be interested. It's entirely possible my skepticism is influenced on my preference for "free."
EDIT - I made some assumptions in language and not everyone is probably familiar with "brush collection." Here is a municipality's site on what qualifies and how it is done -