Lawns that have newly-installed bark give off the impression that someone has spent hours with a rake spreading it in exactly the right places. After all, everything looks perfect. Not only does the barked area stop at precisely the right place, but the depth is exactly right as well. The idea of having to do all of that work might have made you shudder.
In reality, getting the perfect appearance isn’t hard at all. It doesn’t involve one person or even a crew laboriously working with rakes. Instead, it is done by hiring a company like Best Buy in Town Landscape Supply to come and install it. The crew doesn’t use rakes, but instead relies on specialized machines that actually blow the bark into the right places. A closer examination of this bark will reveal another secret: It’s not all big chunks of mulch material. Instead, it’s bark dust in Portland, Oregon. The use of fine particles makes it easy to run the material through the blowers and onto the desired areas of the landscape. Larger chunks of bark may then be added by hand to beef up the appearance of the mulched areas, but this is a relatively small aspect of the installation.
The final part of the equation is to get the crisp edges that make a landscape look professionally done. This aspect is the only part that can be a bit laborious for the homeowner. It requires covering up the areas that aren’t supposed to get any bark dust. This makes it so that when the covers are removed after the job is done, there is a hard break between the parts of the yard that have bark dust in Portland, Oregon, and those that have none.
There are many kinds of bark that can be used for bark dust installations. Cedar, fir, and three kinds of hemlock are readily available. Pebble bark or bark nuggets, which are more substantial, can be used to top off the bark dust or to provide extra weed-prevention power in locations known to harbor the seeds or roots of tough weeds. This will also add visual impact to an installation without the need for nearly as much work as an all-nugget installation.
