Whole lot of mulching going on

Saturday dawned nice and early, and it was our day to run sprints. But Friday night had been a bit longer than we intended, so after one sprint, I said, "I can't do this."

"Okay," said Eric. "Let's go get coffee."

So we did. Then the planned "get the kids to work" day began. The ratio of work by child to whining by child was. . . low, shall we say. Even Thing 1, who usually can do quite a bit, spent a lot of her energy on her emotions rather than the wheelbarrow.

I wanted to prep the area before laying the mulch because, you know, that Bermuda grass stuff. I'll be pulling it the day before I'm laid in my grave, I betcha. So I did a lot of digging with a fork and stooping. The kids who weren't shoveling picked up trash. It's only fair, since most of the trash was theirs. . . but oddly enough they didn't see it that way.

Here's what one bit of yard looked like mostly post-weeding and very pre-mulching:


The sandy dirt is partly why I sweep and vacuum so much. It's just tracked, by four feets and two feets all over. Unlike some television gardening diva, I manage to look like a nut most of the time I'm working:


Itchy noses and dirty work are a dynamite combination. Fortunately, I wash nicely.


And after what felt like dozens and dozens of loads of mulch, here's that same area. Apparently the tree company had chipped either different kinds of trees or different parts of trees, since one side of the mulch pile was much redder than the other, while one seemed whiter. Since the children were starting on different sides, we got a neat bicolor effect. And since we have a lot, we're laying it on thick.

Eric and Thing 4 rested after finishing a big whack of the yard. We still have a whole lot of yard -- all around the garden, all around the lawn, and up each side of the house -- to thickly mulch.


Fortunately, no matter how much mulch we put down, we apparently got a load from the magical mulch company, because I don't think the pile is really much smaller at all: