Check with your town. Some towns sell or even give away mulch that they've made from the yard trash collections. You just need a pick-up truck.

Just about anything can be mulch. Kitchen trimmings (NO meat of dairy though), old or moldy hay, the "trimmings" from the grocery to name a few. Lawn trimmings always get raked into the circles around trees at our place but can be used. Leaf rakings are great. Do you have a lumber yard near by? sometimes they will have lots of saw dust.
Some of these may lock up nitrogen at first (esp. grass and sawdust) so you may want to add chicken manure with them.
Some fruits may draw ants or the local wild life so you may have to see what works in your spot.

Call around to your local tree care companies, like Asplundah (sp?). some of them will give you mulch by the pickup load if you come get it and some of them will drop it off by your house if they are in your area. If they don't give it away, they usually sell it REAL CHEAP!

Some sources say that fresh wood chips leach nitrogen from the soil. Others say it is not true and fresh chips are fine to use. I don't know which is true, but if you go that route it may be a good idea to be aware of this and add nitrogen if needed. Personally I use woodchips for the pathways and purchase shredded hardwood mulch for the beds. I like the contrast in looks and the mulch breaks down faster improving the soil, which my clay needs. If you use woodchips (which I agree is a great way to get cheap mulch) maybe mix in some grass clippings to help return nitrogen to the soil. Happy mulching! - Aislinn

Dallas County distributes mulch very cheap or free as long as you are a county resident. Last time I went, they had 2 or 3 grades, from roughly shredded to finely composted.
Contact them at 214-225-2973.

You can sheets of newspapers down as the first layer (you don't even have to cut the grass out, if you have a think enough layer, then it will kill the grass/weeds). Top it with bark or chips. I got this idea from Ruth-Stout books a long time ago. Now there is something called Lasagna Gardening that is a similar concept.

My mulch of preference is chopped pine straw. Regular pine straw is fine for some areas, but the chopped stuff is SO easy to work with, place around plants, stays put, looks good wet or dry.

If you know anyone with pine trees, ask them if you can have the straw. Chop it with a couple passes of the lawn mower (dusty work!) You can buy it too, but I'm not sure it'll be any cheaper than the bark. I prefer it to the bark because it doesn't wash away.

During the fall you will see dozens of lawn and leaf
bags filled with leaves setting along the road for trash pick up. You could just pick up a few or as many as you require. I use a great tool called a Lawn Hog( Black and Decker), which you can get at Home Depot. It acts like a
vaccuum cleaner and sucks them up and grinds them into a
bag,which is attatched. It will turn those leaves into finely chopped Mulch which you can then ad to your beds.
You can do this in the Fall and your beds will be Mulched and ready for Spring. Or sometimes people wait until Spring to rake their leaves, so you could do this early in year.
I think this makes the best Mulch and it's free. The Lawn
Hog is about 65.00, and replacement blades are 4.00 I usually get two per year. The sharper the blade the finer the Mulch. It also comes with leaf blower attatchment. It
helps to blow leaves into a pile before mulching.
Mine was such a hit with my gardener friends ,they all got one for themselves.

Fernzilla,
Thanks for the tip about the Lawn Hog!! I can't wait until fall! I can't wait to see the look on my husband's face when I tell him that Fernzilla recommended a Lawn Hog for leaf mulch! He already thinks I've lost with my mind with the compost experiments and the way I get giddy when I get a load of manure. Gosh, I love gardening!

Hi my name is Debbie and I'm an admitted taker of grass clippings and leaves bags folks leave out for the garbage. I, too, have a huge garden and mulch is expensive and also hard for me to physically haul. I use alot of newspaper (just make sure the ground is wet when you apply them and you get the newspaper very wet)for areas I'm just trying to prevent weeds in for a long time (like between seasons or around perennials). I just use what I can find: grass clippings in summer, leaves in winter. I espiecially like it in the fall when you get "mixed bags" of lawn clippings and grass together. I also buy bags of hardwood mulch and use them too. I've been in the house now for 12 years and have really good soil.

Frenzilla--thanks for the hint on the lawn hog! I've often wanted to make those clippings even smaller but had no method. Good price on that too!

shredded office paper is also a good first layer to a lasagne bed.

I made a new nursery bed this year with the following method, placing this all on top of sod:

1 layer wet cardboard.
2" layer of shredded office paper
10 layers of wet newspaper

On top of that I put 10" of topsoil, and planted my raspberries and also heeled in various herbs that I needed to thin out from my garden.

That was in April, the raspberries and remaining herbs (lots went off to friends houses) are still doing well and there was no grow-through from the sod underneath.

Here is a link that might be useful: my gardens