So you are about to take advantage of this killer real estate market and LIST your house to sell. Yay!!! You want your house to have immediate curb appeal and pop. Your shrubs and plant beds look a little shaggy and neglected. What do you do? Trim the bushes, plant some new ones to add “color”, and then mulch the beds in preparation to listing it.

How do most people buy mulch? They call around and find someone who will haul a load out for the cheapest they can find it, right? You might want to re-think that. How do you know how long your landscaper’s pile of mulch has been lying out in the elements? Answer…..YOU DON’T!!!

Why am I even asking this you think…well, what loves to eat mulch…termites. It is a perfect host for the creepie crawly critters. It is damp, generates its own heat (so is warm), and it made of wood particles. Sounds like a party. A critter party.

You might wonder how I figured this out. Here it is. Hard, face-down in the mud reality. I was speaking with another realtor and she said that she has had a couple of situations in the past year where someone mulched their beds in anticipation of listing their house. They even had a termite inspection prior to this–it was clear. They had new mulch put down. It looked great! They got a contract right away. In the inspection period, the buyer’s termite company found that there were termites around the foundation of the house. The seller could not prove that it was from the new mulch (but it was) and so had to pay $600 to have their previously termite-free house treated for the pesky buggers.

What can a person do? I spoke with Matt Dawson at Natural Creations landscaping and Samara Farms nursery and he suggested buying bags of mulch from Home Depot or Lowe’s. He says it is a little more expensive, BUT you can feel confident that there will be no critters or termites inside. Additionally, he buys the bags exclusively now because it saves him valuable labor and time. Before he had to get a load, then have employee’s scoop it off the truck, into an unwieldy wheelbarrow, then wheel it over to the bed and dump it and then spread it around. He says that it is so much easier to handle out of the bag that a job is done twice as fast.

So think about your mulch next time you are about to buy a load of it and have it delivered. It might pay to buy it in bags.