As you know, I’ve taken a Big Step forward into real gardening by figuring out what was beyond me and making arrangements with my very own “Garden Gal,” who is doing amazing work in getting the vague ideas in my head on to paper and working with my budget and skill level to begin what is going to be a lengthy process to turn our regular, suburban “just plain grass” yard into a riot of color and textures with whimsy and surprises tucked here and there.
I’ve been working on one of my plans for about six weeks now – I bought a couple of pre-fab raised beds and a slew of pots. Once the danger of frost was passed, I started collecting herbs with the idea of making an “herb clock” with twelve different plants arranged in a circle around a low birdbath that I already had. But what really needed doing was ripping down and then mulching some of the scrubby weeds and matted grass at the back of the yard. Garden Gal did the mowing so I had something to work with. I did some rough math and priced bulk mulch. I then became That Friend who asked if I could borrow a pickup truck. My wise and incredibly able friend (we’ll call him “Potter” here) agreed, but insisted that he’d do the driving.
I’d been collecting cardboard for months and I spent a chunk of yesterday putting the raised beds together and then lying down cardboard on two long strips of yard (oh, and that involved borrowing bolt cutters from a neighbor to get rid of the chain-and-padlock that was holding my fence gate shut) and wetting them down. No kidding – looking at those long strips of wet cardboard made me a little queasy. There was going to be a lot of work today.
We got to the mulch place (for reasons that will become obvious, I’m keeping them anonymous) and I proceeded to learn that a truckful of mulch (we were actually going to need two) is the smallest of small potatoes to an industrial mulch/topsoil/compost operation. It took a while, just because no one was on “small potatoes” duty. Potter and I kept each other entertained (while counting the number of tractor-trailers trucks that were being loaded) and I marveled at the loader’s delicacy and precision in loading hundreds of pounds of mulch into the truck bed.
Once loaded, I went in to pay. By the way, bulk purchases work like this – you drive onto a truck-sized scale which weighs your non-loaded truck. After loading, you drive back onto the scale, then go pay. We had a little over a thousand pounds of mulch in the truck bed, only to be told by the fella manning the pay station that he was just helping out that day and had no idea how to run any payment that wasn’t cash.
Gulp. I had a thousand pounds of mulch and no cash.
Friends, sometimes the universe wants to remind you that kindness exists. He told me to just take the mulch. I explained that I couldn’t do that and he said, “You have any idea how much mulch we’ve got here? Yeah, me neither. Pay for it next time you come here.” I cautiously asked if Cleveland County’s finest was going to be searching for the Mulch Bandit and he grinned, saying, “I worked for them for 25 years. You’re good. Happy Mother’s Day.”
We went home, Potter used a pitchfork with tremendous accuracy and I wheeled barrow after barrow. (Let me make it clear that I didn’t expect Potter to be doing so much of the heavy work – but I was grateful!) After lunch (during which time I got cash), we got another load and I settled my bill, which was criminally small – it pays to be nice and understanding when interacting with people. I’ve got some very pretty areas now for Garden Gal to work with and, while there’s plenty left to do, a start is nothing to sneer at.
And you can bet I’ll be going back to what I now think of as “my” mulch place.
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