Mulch delivery in Austin is one half of this page. The other half is the mulching itself: how much area to cover, where the material goes, and what it does for the tree. We make our own mulch and compost out of the trees we prune and remove, send it out by the load in three sizes, and our crews will spread it and work compost into the root zone.
Proper Mulching Trees
Proper mulching starts with where the material goes. Mulch covers the root zone and stays back off the trunk and the root flare, and it never gets piled against the bark. Depth is a judgment rather than a formula: deep enough to hold moisture, moderate the soil temperature and keep weeds down, shallow enough that water and air still reach the roots underneath. Our crews set it against what is already on the ground, because a bed that has been mulched for years wants a top up and bare or eroded ground wants more than that.
Area is where most mulch jobs are decided, and it is the part people underestimate. A three foot ring around the trunk of a mature tree is mostly cosmetic. It is not a large enough area to change anything about the tree’s condition. There is no hard rule, but an area under about 20 feet across is getting small around a mature tree, and small enough that a machine is not much help spreading it. Around a young tree, the mulched area should grow a little every year until it reaches a useful size. The mulch calculator will work out the cubic yards once you have an area.
Mulching is soil management work, and ANSI A300 Part 2 is the industry standard that covers it. Our crews work to it, and to Z133 for safety on site. How far out to go and how much to put down is a call an ISA certified arborist makes at the tree, not something the delivery driver decides.
Composting as Tree Care
Compost is a tree care service in its own right, and it can be bought on its own. We deliver it in bulk by the load and our crews apply it over root zones, into turf and into beds.
Where a tree’s roots sit under lawn, compost goes down as a thin top dressing, light enough that the grass grows up through it rather than being smothered, and it works down into the soil over the following weeks. Where the root zone is in beds, it goes under the mulch. Austin soils give it plenty to do: thin and alkaline over the limestone west of I-35, heavy clay to the east, and organic matter breaks down fast in both.
Compost sits alongside our tree care programs, and it is often what we recommend first, either before a program starts or alongside it. A compost application can be booked on its own with no program attached, and a program does not require one.
Our Mulch Is Different
Our mulch is the wood that comes off our own work. Chip debris from pruning and removal jobs across Austin comes back to the yard, and the larger wood runs through the horizontal grinder there.
Two products come out of that. The standard mulch is the finer of the two, and it is what goes into beds and over root zones. The single grind product is coarser, with bigger chunks that break down more slowly, and it is the one people take for paths and trails.
We leave the fines in and we add no color. The fines are the small, partly broken down material that comes off a grind, and leaving them in means the mulch carries its own compost with it as it settles. What arrives is a natural wood product the color of the trees it came from.
The material is made and stored where our trucks dispatch from, so a delivery is our own product off our own yard. Knowing which grind to send is the rest of it. A bed under a mature live oak and a trail through a greenbelt want different material, and a load of the wrong one is a lot of shoveling, so we ask what the material is going on before we load a truck.
Bulk Mulch Delivery
We deliver by the load in three sizes: 10, 15 and 30 cubic yards, mulch or compost. A load can be bought on its own, with no other work attached.
We match the truck to the site rather than the other way around. Our Switch-N-Go trucks swap bodies, so the same chassis that runs a chipper body on a removal carries a mulch dump body the next morning, and we can send the capacity a driveway will actually take instead of the capacity that happened to be loaded. The smallest load runs on a medium duty truck that fits a residential street. The larger ones go on a dump trailer and the roll-off bodies.
On volume jobs we bring machines to move the material. A Caterpillar IT14 wheel loader where there is room to work, a Giant G1200 tele-loader where the pile has to be reached over something, and the Boxer mini skid steers where access is tight, which for us means a 36 inch gate. That is the difference between a crew spreading 30 yards and a crew spreading it by wheelbarrow.
Airspade Incorporation
Before a fresh layer of mulch goes down on compacted ground, we will often run an airspade over the top few inches of soil first. Compressed air breaks up the surface without cutting roots, and the loosened ground takes the new material rather than shedding it in the next hard rain. Compost can be worked into that tilled layer before the mulch goes on top.
The rig for it rides on the same Switch-N-Go system. One body carries the airspade compressor and a spray tank, so soil decompaction, compost incorporation and the mulch layer can happen on a single visit instead of three. Whether a site wants it at all is a call our arborists make on the ground: a root zone under years of lawn traffic and a root zone inside an established bed are not in the same condition, and only one of them needs the machine.
This is an option, not a prerequisite. Mulch and compost are both sold and delivered on their own.