When moving into a new home, it can sometimes be quite perplexing when assessing what the previous owners left behind. One Redditor shared their experience with some questionable landscaping that would require a fair bit of labor.
While posting to r/landscaping, the homeowner explained that despite moving into their new home about a year earlier, they hadn't gotten a good look at the home's landscaping yet.
But once they did, they found layers of mulch, landscaping fabric, rubber mulch, and plastic. "In that order," the original poster wrote.
The Redditor sought the advice of the other users on how to approach what they called a "big job." Additionally, the original poster hoped to obtain a better understanding of the previous homeowner's thought process. "Does anyone have any idea why someone would do this?" they wrote.
Although the plants, trees, and shrubs appeared to be healthy, the Redditor was unsure how they were able to get water through all of the unwanted material in the soil.
Every year, around 280 million rubber tires are discarded in America. In an effort to recycle many of those tires, mulch is made using their rubber. Although the rubber mulch can be a durable and low-maintenance landscaping material, it can be detrimental to the health of plants.
Not only does rubber mulch not contribute any nutrients to replenish soil, but the material in the tires can contain chemicals such as chromium, which can negatively impact the growth of plants and disrupt nutrient uptake.
The original poster did note that they lived in a "Zone 7b" region, which means that the area can face minimum winter temperatures between 5 degrees Fahrenheit and 10 degrees Fahrenheit. Rubber mulch is sometimes used to help regulate temperatures inside garden beds during frigid weather.
However, one commenter had another explanation for the use of rubber mulch underneath landscaping fabric and mulch. "They did it because they were lazy and worked on top of the last mess they made," argued the commenter.
Regardless of the motivations of the previous homeowner, the original poster understood that the landscaping project wasn't going to be easy when switching to a natural yard. "It's going to be some work to dig it all out," they wrote.
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