I Heart Mulch

One of the things I did with my holiday weekend was get more mulch. That stuff is addictive, I swear. I had just put one of my tomato plants into the ground recently, and it just looked so sad and naked amongst all the other plants happily nestled in their mulch. Plus whenever I watered it, most of the water ran off in various directions and didn't make it to the roots. It was definitely time for more mulch.

I decided I would combine several errands. So I popped open the hatch, put down the back seat, and loaded up the two blue bins and shovel. Then I layered in the soda containers until there was no sign of the recycling containers, and barely a reflection in the rear view mirror over all the cans. My husband is down with many a green practice, but giving up his beloved soda is not a thought he would begin to entertain. In SodaBoy's world, there might be no bigger blasphemy.

So the containers pile up in the garage, drifting into corners until they start swallowing up entire bags of potting soil. I have a pretty high tolerance for such things, but every so often I'll get sick of looking at the mountains of containers, and make such a purge. [This is not simply an issue of too much space--when we lived in a walk up apartment, our elderly upstairs neighbor never used the back stairs, and we would build up huge collections there, as well.]

Now that I am blogging about the joy of returnables, I can compete with myself. The 679 containers I returned in January? Psht!! Saturday afternoon, I returned 826. Yeah, that's right... jealous? Seriously, I rock. And then I stopped on the way home and got my mulch. The only problem with my bottle runs is that they burn me out. That Christmas cactus never got re-potted, and when I got home with the mulch, I was too tired to spread it. I thought I would simply do it yesterday, but by then, the cursed foul heat had sank back over the lands, further draining my energy.

I spent the hottest part of the afternoon holed up reading In Defense of Food, then went out to do some yard work in the evening. Of course, I couldn't spread my mulch without weeding first, and then I got thinking it was about time to use the new bow saw I got for my birthday, and an hour and a half and much sweat later, I had only dispensed with half the mulch. But I had cut out a few volunteer trees from my vegetable garden, and that means more sun for the tomatoes and basil. Plus when the heat breaks, I'll have that extra bin of mulch just waiting for me. Hooray!