The Fort Myers News-Press Feature

Monday May 10, 2004

Forestry Resources makes mulch of unwanted plants

By LAURA RUANE, lruane@news-press.com
 Published by news-press.com on May 10, 2004

Money does grow on trees, even those invasive non-natives that play havoc with Southwest Florida wetlands.  

Photo Above:  Avigael Perez stacks bags of cypress mulch at Forestry Resources Inc. onto pallets that will be wrapped and loaded onto trucks for shipment. The three machines that bag the mulch can produce 24 bags per minute.  

Just ask officials at Forestry Resources in east Fort Myers.

For more than a decade, the company has harvested stands of melaleuca, eucalyptus and other trees, ground them into garden mulch, and then sold it, wholesale and retail.

We sell an enormous amount of melaleuca mulch.  Its almost completely through grass-roots demand, said John Cauthen, company president.

Cauthen's company doesn't mess with backyard tree-grinding.  It gets its raw materials from land-clearing for major developments and through environmental restoration and mitigation projects.

Landscape contractors are the core customers; however, the company also private-labels mulch for Lowe's home improvement stores in the region.  It also makes a custom mulch that WCI Communities uses in the public areas of its residential developments.

Vertically integrated, Forestry Resources also sells its mulch and some kinds made by others, at four retail stores in Fort Myers, Cape Coral, Estero and Naples.  A fifth store will open this fall in Lehigh Acres.

Retail prices range from about $1.35 for a 2-cubic-foot bag of Vita-Mulch- a blend of various wood fibers, soil, sand, humus and organic minerals, to $6.50 for a 3-cubic-foot bag of cypress bark mulch. FloriMulch, the melaleuca product, costs $2.49 for a 2-cubic-foot bag.

Cypress mulch is the top seller nationally, but isn't favored by environmentally sensitive folks who say some Florida swamps are being stripped of trees, and in some cases not regenerating them.

Another big controversy has been the marketing of mulch made from older, pressure-treated wood. Some consumers buying recycled wood mulch have unknowingly spread traces of arsenic in their yards.

Cauthen said his company doesn't make mulch from recycled wood products.

Dyed mulch is trendy, however: Black is huge up North, Cauthen said, adding that red, gold and earth tones are the most popular hues here.

One nice thing about selling organic mulch is that it needs to be replaced at least once a year, as it degrades into the soil.  Cauthen added that aesthetically driven people will mulch up to two times yearly.

As for melaleuca mulch:  There are many thousands of acres of melaleuca. There won?t be a shortage.

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