Made a mistake, but it’s time to fix it. Help!

Hi 👋

We are planting up our garden border-beds from scratch and I have attached a video of where we are today for reference. We thought using weed membrane was going to be the way to go, with decorative stone (medium size) on top. However, since we planted some of the plants we’ve noticed they just aren’t getting enough water but other areas are waterlogged. My friend came to visit and told us that this can be a downside of using weed membrane. We’ve done a bit more research (though I thought we’d done enough before, but apparently not 🙈) and decided to pull up ‘le carpette dangerousse’ lol. (It was such a bugger to cut for planting, too 😭😭😭 such a lot of time and effort wasted – but better not to continue with a mistake. Thankfully we hadn’t planted everything!)

Our plan is to put down mulch and/or bark chippings instead. Research says mulch is better for soil conditioning but bark chippings are more long-lasting and can look better. Cost isn’t a major issue as we have saved up to do this and have it in the budget. Do you have preference or advice over one or the other at all?

If we go with mulch or both, we were considering choosing ‘Strulch’, which has a slug-deterrent in – we get so many of the yukky things, they’ve eaten loads of stuff 😠. It says ideal depth is 5-7.5cm / 2-3″. We’ve been debating whether it might be worth doing 2″ of Strulch then a topping of bark chippings. Hopefully we’d get the best of both worlds!

Any thoughts (polite ones preferably lol) would be most appreciated!

Oh – if it matters we’re in zone 10a, in the UK. Our garden is fairly sheltered (we haven’t had a flake of snow in like 10 years as we’re fairly near the River Severn and it seems to create a micro-climate – that’s my non-scientific explanation lol)
Thank you muchly, Blossom