Not That Interesting Unless You Are Fascinated By Mulch

It’s the end of another weekend, and in spite of my usual practice, it was actually a productive one, and I’m pretty happy about that. I’m just not that motivated (or organized) a person as a general rule, but now and then even I can actually get something done around here.

Yesterday was one of the exceptions to the Rule of Saturday; normally, I spend the first few hours of the first morning of the weekend in bed, listening to NPR’s Saturday Edition, and then to Car Talk, and then to WWDTM. Possibly also to “Whaddya Know.” By then, it’s almost noon or after, and I might wander downstairs to grab a bowl of cereal, then wander even further downstairs to the shadowy Lair of Computers. Where, truth be told, I often end up spending all or most of the day, emerging only for food and a decent rerun of CSI or What Not To Wear or The Vicar of Dibley.

Sundays: less sleeping in. Sunday Edition for the Mensa quiz, then choir pracice at 9:30, followed by churrrch, and then either an interminable meeting OR chatting with people over coffee, followed by either more lurking in the Lair or rushing off to make it to a family gathering. More lair-lurking in the evening. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Exciting, yes? No.

Yesterday, though, I actually got a hell of a lot of stuff done. By 12:30. Together, we disposed of hazardous waste and pruned a lot of branches and suckers off of the one crab-apple tree and bagged the result (the suckers, not the hazmat waste). And then I got a hell of a lot more stuff done, with breaks for watching TV and grabbing a drink. And then David put a very small turkey in the oven using the new roasting pan and following the directions that came with our cute little Butterball (he called it “Following the FAQ,” and the results were delicious).

The end result: 11 bags of mulch put down in the front, with one more to go right alont the front edge of the yew bushes. New plants bought, placed where they’ll probably go, and watered well. Ran out of daylight, energy, and the ability to bend over before I could actually get the plants in.

If you really want to know more about mulch than anyone should bother with, you may read on.

Like I said, I’m pretty slug-ish and sluggish of a Saturday morning normally, but yesterday I decided I might as well go off first thing in the morning to Home Depot to price mulch, check for some bedding plants, and at least have the stuff here in case there was a break in the weather, which wasn’t looking that promising. So a while after my husband David brought our morning coffee up (he grinds some good beans on weekend mornings and we have a proper brew-up) I rolled out, threw on some clothes best described as “okay to get dirty in” and drove to Home Depot. But on the way there, I took a wrong turn (duh, I was on autopilot) and in correcting myself, went past a big, big sign screaming “Right turn at the next light for regional Hazardous Waste Materials disposal today!!!” And sure enough, some volunteer cops were directing traffic in and out of the parking lot of the local high school, and dozens of people were at work sorting, tossing, and pouring out hazmat gunk. They were all in white Tyvek jumpsuits and some had industrial-strength breathing masks.

And I thought of the dozen-and-a-half cans of partly used paint, plus at least two large 5-gallon pails of the stuff, taking up space in the garage. Ha hah! I called David and alerted him that after I returned from Home Despot, I’d pick up whatever hazmat gunk he could gather together in the garage. He had at least an hour to get started, as it turns out. Plenty of time. So I went off and found the mulch I wanted, but changed my plan and picked up a variety of bedding plants first and loaded up the back of the RAV with enough to “do” the two whiskey barrels, plus some new flowering perennials I’d try out for fun this year.

Some background on gardening: last year, I didn’t do any at all other than discuss the lawn service we were using then with David. I was in a bit of a slump when it came to things domestic, and then also it was a pretty crappy spring and summer, and was either too rainy or too hot to do much on the weekends, or when the weather was good, we had family committments. Frankly, last season was a downer and frustrating as hell, because whenever I DID feel like doing something for my own enjoyment outside, we had a conflict.

This year, I feel more energy, more desire to have something pretty growing lavishly and luxuriously on the approach to the front door – like I did 2 years ago, when I first bought a pair of rain barrels from Gardeners.com. One of the side effects of having them made it easy and fun to keep the one whiskey barrel well watered, and the other was that rain water is very, very good for plants. Add a little Miracle-gro plant food and even a black thumb like me can get stuff to grow, even flourish. I had fresh herbs in the back and in pots, too.

I missed having the herbs last year, so yeah, I’m back on a gardening kick this year. I picked out some of my “tried and true” container plants (sweet potato vines in lime green and purple, lobelia, geraniums, that kind of thing) and added a few new ones to stick in to the “kitty garden” to replace the pinks and stuff that didn’t make it through the winter (the catmint, coral bells, fountain grass and purple gayfeather made it, though). And this year I’m going to give three wee little clematis vines a start by the boring, blank side of the garage (trellises to follow). And for the patio planters, I got a couple of other sun-tolerant plants. Once again, I’ll have some impatiens growing by the front door – they seem to like the shade there, and they remind me of Maui every time I see them (they grow wild there, year round).

So I returned with all the plants, stashed them in their pots down in the whiskey barrels, watered them, and started thinking about exactly how I’d plant them up. It turned out David had gotten industrious with lopping off all the overgrown suckers from the one tree that the tree service has been nagging us to prune. So those got loaded into yard waste sacks. Then we loaded up the stash of hazmat stuff (all paint – I’d thought we had some other gunk, but it was just paint) and dropped it off at the (extremely well-organized and successful) temporary disposal station. Back to Home Despot for puttering around (David) and picking up a dozen bags of dark mulch (me). I spent the rest of the afternoon alternating between weeding, hauling mulch, hauling compost (15 gallons of the stuff; I needed to build up one bed that lost a lot of soil) and taking breaks for refreshment and TV -watching. It was surprisingly effective. I didn’t get the plants in, but that was more because I was too bushed from all the lifting and loading and bending and digging. I just couldn’t bend or stoop or kneel or any that any more. And today, I had a family thing after church, so the plants are going to have to wait 1 more day.

And besides which, I was pretty sore. But the front of the house already looks a lot better, and it’ll be looking better still in a couple of days.

When I reached the staggering stage, but still had several more bags of mulch to get out of the back of the RAV, David had a lot more turkey-watching to do. We put the bird in the oven at about 4pm for dinner at 8pm, and though we’d planned on more dishes, in the end we had turkey, couscous, and gravy. The gravy turned out better than you might expect for something made up on the spur of the moment. We’d stuff the turkey with 1 large onion, quartered, and most of a container of mushrooms, a bunch of fresh and frozen thyme (found a bag in the freezer, thought it probably couldn’t kill us) and snippets of fresh rosemary and sage. Plus two heads of garlic, one reduced to peeled cloves, one drizzled with olive oil and shoved into the turkey’s… aperture as an afterthought. Aside from the whole head of garlic, all of this got blended together with the drippings after dumping flour in the roasting pan and toasting it on top of the stove. It was very flavorful, but not velvety smooth – more sort of country gravy.

After returning from the family thing (computer-related, with dinner), we bought a few books and came on home.

So, well done us. Yesterday was good, today was good. Time for a good night’s sleep, because we earned it.