Garden Variety: Mulch to think about here - Mid-Atlantic gardening: Tips and pictures on flowers, vegetables, public gardens, composting and farmers’ markets

It is as much a spring scent as that of the first grass clippings: that dusty smell of mulch.

Crews can be found in every neighborhood and around every business about now, piling the brown stuff around trees and in gardens.

Huge piles of the stuff sit in driveways, waiting for the homeowner there to dedicate an entire weekend to spreading the stuff around the yard.

And I haven't even ordered mine yet.

Timing the application of mulch can be tricky.

Put it down too early and the ground will take longer to warm up.

Put it down before the spring rains have come and gone and you won't be sealing in as much moisture, which is what mulch is designed to do.

Put it down before the perennials have emerged and you might be burying a weak sister for good.

But if you wait too long to put your mulch down, the gardens will have filled in, making it that much harder to work safely around all that plant material.

What's a gardener to do?

I told myself last year I wasn't going to mulch this season. I have been piling mulch on my beds for years and years. There are places in my garden when the mulch has formed a hard shell and where all the water just runs off. Everybody needed a break, I thought.

And when I dressed the beds with a load of Leafgro compost material, I was convinced. This, then, was the right stuff to use.

Besides, my colleague Jacques Kelly says he doesn't mulch at all. That's landscaping, he said, not gardening.

But it is spring now, and the beds are looking scruffy and ill-kept. My husband will edge them with a spade soon and the contrast between his work and mine will be sharper still. A nice layer of mulch can fix that, I tell myself.

I don't know how this story will end. Except this: If I do order mulch this year, I am hiring somebody to help me put it down.

Mulching, after all, is not gardening.