Over the years I have installed many many cubic yards of top dress mulch. I have been asked on numerous occasions to recommend a mulch and I always recommend a pine product. I also have always recommended to NOT use cypress even if the client hasn't inquired about. Why might you ask? Sustainability and good stewardship of our environment particularly of our wetlands, that's why. Generally maintaining your landscape is a good thing. But when it causes harm to another part of the environment, that's not so good especially when it is unnecessary. You see, in order to get cypress mulch you need cypress trees and those trees have to be felled in order to make mulch. Unlike Eucalyptus mulch, you can't strip the cypress bark from the tree, you have to cut the tree down. "Don't you have to cut down a pine tree to get the bark?" Yep, but pine trees are cropped and managed just like corn, or azaleas, or grass. After they harvest the tree a new one is planted and the cycle starts over. Cypress trees just take too long to make a tree mature enough to produce good mulch. A cypress tree is doing a whole lot more alive in the swamp than ground up in your yard. So the next time you mulch your beds, forget about using cypress and go for the pine.
I just happened to stumble upon this paper, which is linked to this post(source at bottom of page), today and thought wow I have always said this. In the paper it answers questions that clients have had about pine vs cypress. It also supports what I have been saying to clients for years, "we use mulches derived from pine".
I also said to myself, self this is a great topic to make your first blog post about. So there ya go, I am officially a blogger.