Grass

• Grass is one beneficial plant you can use as mulch cover in the garden. Using grass clippings cleans up the yard and provides healthy mulch for your plants. When you mow the lawn, put a bag on the mower to make this job easy. Rake the grass after mowing if your mower does not come equipped with a bag. Once the bag is full, spread the grass clippings in the garden and around the plants.
  
  

Deciduous Trees

• Leaves may be a yard nuisance to you every fall, but look at them in a different way this year. Turn those leaves into beneficial mulch for the garden. You can rake up the leaves and simply spread them out in the garden plot. However, they take a while to decompose and can become slippery if the leaves get wet. Use a lawn mower to efficiently chop up the leaves. Pile up the leaves to about 4 inches thick around any plants that need mulching. Bark is another option from trees for mulching. For those that burn wood to heat their homes, bark is abundant. When splitting wood, sometimes the bark separates from the log. Set all these pieces aside and it will not be long before you have a large pile. Send all these bark pieces through a chipper to break them up. Spread this mulch around your garden plant to inhibit weed growth and save moisture.
  
  

Live Plants

• Gardeners can use living plants as a form of mulch or ground cover. These low-growing plants offer the same benefits of mulch, only they are alive and add to the overall look of the garden. Some of these low-growing plants include ivy, lamb's ear, verbena and creeping thyme. Once these plants are in the garden, they take little effort to keep them growing, while they prevent soil erosion and keep moisture from evaporating quickly from the soil.
  
  

Pine Trees

• Pine needles make good mulch. If you have pine trees in your landscape and don't know what to do with the needles, use them in your garden. Collect the pine needles as they pile up underneath the trees and send them through a chipper to break them down a little bit and make them easier to handle, or use them as is. Spread the pine needle mulch around plants in your garden. Pine needles make great mulch for plants that prefer the soil to be a little acidic, as they add acid to the soil as they break down.