Check you Aldi for a special purchase featuring mulch. It's a 2.0 cubic feet bag of cypress mulch.

Typically, 2- or 3-cubic-foot bags work well for small beds. For the bed above, you would divide the 53 cubic feet of mulch required by the amount of mulch in the bag.

Compare that to a standard 2-cubic-foot bag of wood mulch, which weighs about 25 pounds and covers 12 square feet.

Average cost: $2.49 per 2-cubic-foot bag, $20 per cubic yard. MELALEUCA Advantages: Excellent mulch because of its long-lasting qualities.

WARREN (WWJ/AP) - The Michigan Department of Transportation is paying $2.3 million to cover up dead-looking areas of vegetation along a Detroit-area freeway with mulch.

This week you can also get Pine Bark Brown Mulch for $1.66 each or 3 for $5. It's the shredded-style. The bag size is 2 cubic feet. The sale if from 7 a.m. to 11 a.m. Saturday only.

Since mulch is sold in bags containing 2 or 3 cubic feet, I would purchase either six 2-cubic-foot bags or four 3-cubic-foot bags for a total of 12 cubic feet.

A single 2-cubic foot bag of mulch tipped my scale around 40 pounds (give or take a little for weight added by moisture), so the 30 bags plus my 175 pounds used up around 1,375 pounds of the 1,681 ...

Customers can select from traditional premium dark hardwood mulch, sold in three-cubic-foot bags, or "absolute black," which is sold in two-cubic-foot bags, Jump said.

Adding a layer of mulch minimizes time spent weeding and watering. If you need to refresh mulch around your property you can spend more than $4 per bag for two cubic feet (the average sized bag).

In the example above, when applying mulch 3 inches deep: one bag contains 2 cubic feet of mulch, which should cover 8 square feet; 150 cubic feet needed divided by two = 75 bags.