๐ŸŒณMulch calculators

Measure the bed once, then answer every mulch question that follows it โ€” volume, bags, cost, depth and safety surfacing.

โœ“ Tested & verified Updated: How we calculate this

Mulch is the one landscape material almost everybody buys and almost nobody measures. The bed gets paced out, a number of bags gets guessed at, and either the last strip goes bare or six bags spend the summer behind the garage. These tools break that guess into the parts that actually have answers: how much volume the bed holds, how many bags of which size that is, what each option costs once delivery is in the picture, and how deep the mulch should have been in the first place.

Frequently asked questions

Which mulch calculator should I start with?

The main mulch calculator on the homepage, because everything else follows from the volume. Once you have cubic yards, the bags page turns it into a shopping list, the cost page tells you whether to buy bags at all, and the depth page shows what a different depth would have cost.

Do these all use the same formula?

Yes โ€” area ร— depth in feet รท 27 for the volume, then each page applies whatever comes next: bag size, price, density or a safety standard. The engine and the density table are shared, so two pages can never disagree with each other.

Is playground mulch calculated differently?

The volume is identical; the depth is not yours to pick. Engineered wood fiber depth is set by the fall height of the equipment under the CPSC playground handbook, so that page starts from a safety table rather than from what looks right on a bed.

How we calculate this

Every calculator in this group works out volume as area ร— depth รท 12 รท 27 โ€” a cubic yard is 27 cubic feet. Bag counts are cubic feet รท bag size, rounded up, using the 0.75, 1, 1.5, 2 and 3 cu ft retail sizes. Weight uses 700 lb per cubic yard for shredded hardwood, 500 for pine bark and engineered wood fiber, from our density table. Depth guidance follows university extension programmes for landscape beds and the US CPSC Public Playground Safety Handbook for surfacing.

Sources:

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What the yard needs this month

Monthly

One job a month, with the depth and the volume it actually needs. No plant catalogues, no upsell โ€” just the material side of the garden.

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