Mulch

I was deceived by the pleasing aesthetics of the landscape when we came with our real estate agent to look at this house. Oh, everything was beautifully edged, mulched, planted, arranged! It was a new homeowner's dream! The ivy draped over the fence was a blanket of luscious green.

Only just after living here for a few weeks, we moved in in June 2006, the height of the growing/drying out season, everything started to look...well...not as pleasing to the eye. Who the heck knew you had to water all of this stuff? I thought you had to water FLOWERS, but the greenery? Before I knew it the vibrant greens were slowing morphing into brownish-tinged weeds.

So we enjoyed getting to know that lay of the land that first summer. I took a hack saw to many things I did not like, only to learn the next spring, that what you cut back grows in thicker and stronger. Damn those ferns. So really I cut my nose to spite my face, because the summer of '07 brought about a garden of all the things I hated.

I should rewind and tell you that I started having literal nightmares about how I would clean up the mess from the fall/winter AND mulch the yard in '07. I began asking around to the people at work who were noted for having a green thumb. Bags of mulch vs. delivery (in yards? huh?) by truck. Landscaping company vs. doing it alone. Red mulch, black mulch, brown mulch...who knew this project had an endless array of selections...I wished there was one answer, cut and dry, that would have just made my life easier.

I sweat through doing it myself in '07. The truck dropped off some ungodly amount of mulch yardage on my front lawn and I went at it little by little. SO little by little in fact, that the lump in the front yard started growing mold and passerbys started making comments as if we were the neighbors with the 15 junky cars propped up on cinder blocks on the lawn. Jeez...don't they know I'm doing this alone? I should mention that my husband works 1,000 hours per week and was unable to assist in this project.

Luckily, my knight in shining armor, took some time on a weekend off in '08 to get this project DONE - man style. He decided bags would be easier so he went to Home Depot and bought 25 bags of red this time. 25 was enough to do only the backyard. So the backyard got done. Remember, man style, one weekend. What didn't get done that weekend, didn't get done. So who cares if we have two sides to our yard and a front? No one will notice! Gosh C, every little thing bothers you. The weeds in the other flower beds grew so tall that year, I could barely find Finster out there. I was pregnant at the time, 7 months along, so all I felt able to do was give the mulch in the back a little shush with my hand to flatten and spread it out. I don't mean to sound ungrateful, I was VERY grateful that I could look out the back window and see my beautiful yard. I just kept the shades on the sides and front drawn that year. Heck, it was only a year.

We live on .17 of an acre and .16 of it is mulch. The other is grass which we pay a landscaper 20 dollars per week to mow. Come to think of it, I could probably cut the one blade of grass with a scissors, and use that 20 bucks to get a manicure every week...I'm going to revisit that "property upkeep" portion of the budget and consider some tweaks...

Here we are 2009. Post-baby, with my pre-baby body, fellin' strooong. I'm a parent now. Practically superhuman. This yard is gonna look F-I-N-E this year. Again, my husband planned to use this weekend off to tackle this job. Only he approaches gardening a little like decorating a dilapidated house. Imagine walking into the grossest house ever. Mold, rot, cobwebs. You take a throw pillow, put it on the dusty couch, put your hands on your hips, breath out, stretch your back and yell, Home Sweet Home! You would NEVER, right? So why on God's green earth would we approach landscaping like that? He wants to take EXPENSIVE mulch and throw it on top of weeds, leaves, pieces of newspaper that blew into our yard, dog poop - you name it - and call it beautiful. ARE YOU KIDDING ME? Mulch was NOT designed to be strategically placed around dandelions. They are not flowers we want to accentuate!

Long story short. The yard is mulched, some dandelions still in place. If you were to remove the mulch, half the yard is clean. The other half might be growing newspaper trees and weeds in a few weeks. I'll give him the benefit of the doubt this year. If no weeds grow in the "dirty" parts of the yard, then next year I say screw it, I'm not edging, raking or cleaning a darn thing.

The moral of this story is don't be tricked by beauty. The previous owners of this house were obviously given a talent by God for yard design and gardening. As for myself and A, we are one step above couch potatoes, with allergies and a fear of yucky bugs. Buyer beware, the gardener doesn't come with the house, but the nastiness of the insects and weeds, well, they do.

The next time you think, "Hey! Let's remove that patch of grass and plant some flowers and mulch around it!" Think again. Let's give the grass some overdue credit. It's a beautiful thing.