Scratch Another Project Off the List

Spring bangs its drum to wake up the sun.

Angel & I spent hours outdoors today. She focused on spring cleanup of flower beds. The various weeds, local and exotic, encroach on plantings during the mild, wet winters. As a result of her ministrations, areas that were overgrown now look open. The flowers and shrubs have room to grow. The rhodedendrons between our house and the neighbors to the west look especially pretty.

Last year I rented a shredder/chipper to turn vast amounts of bark into mulch. It was a hot, messy, exhausting job, but I did end up with a large pile of finely shredded bark.

Before the winter, as an experiment, I piled a fair amount of that shredded bark atop some landscape fabric on the south side of the house. Storms came. Wind blew hard. The shredded bark moved around a little, but not too much. Some weeds poked up through the fabric, but not too many. Thus, the experiment indicates my homemade bark will stay put and perform well as mulch.

So today, I completed a big, mulched border beneath the basement windows on the south and east sides of the house. The area is four feet wide on the south side and three feet wide on the east side. It's, oh I don't know, forty or fifty feet long.

I edged it with rocks... volleyball-sized down to fist size. That holds down the fabric at the boundaries and helps contain the mulch. It looks great, and now when the rains come, water will not splash on the stucco.

I have a lot of rocks. You may remember that I've been hauling rocks to a staging area near our big firewood stacks. These rocks range in size from gravel to boulders too heavy to move by myself. It's great fun to use these in landscape projects. It's very satisfying to use bark that I shredded for mulch. The end result is attractive and the only part that we purchased is the landscape fabric.

I also "did the compost" and picked up more rocks from various parts of the property. Need to keep my rock supply up. Who knows? Maybe someday I'll build a Zen rock garden. Or not.

Knees ache. Elbows ache, but the property took a step up in landscape dimension.