Garden log 5/6/24. Yesterday, I started work on the most labor-intensive part of gardening for me — the annual weeding + laying down of mulch. I enlisted Kevin and the kids into doing the long paths, telling them just to pull up anything big / easy between and around the stones, and then lay down mulch to smother what was still there. With luck, it’ll keep the weeds mostly out, and we’ll be able to use the paths through the season.
The rest of the garden, I mostly need to do myself — I sometimes have Kevin or the kids help with bringing bags of mulch over to the right place and dumping it out in a pile, but my garden is so complex that I can’t really assign anyone else to do the weeding / mulching. Even the professional landscapers wouldn’t work, because they typically pull all kinds of things that most people think of as weeds, but which I enjoy.
It’s a good thing that my semester ends right around now (grades are due on Wednesday, so I’m not QUITE done yet, but soon), because if I don’t put in a few hours a day on the garden for the next week or two, I will regret it mightily for the rest of the year, as the weeds (by which I mean aggressive plants I don’t like) encroach and attack the plants I do like. 🙂
As a writer by trade, I think of this part of gardening as the heavy edit phase — when you go through and ruthlessly cut out all the words you don’t actually need. It’s a little intimidating to start, but once you really get going, it can be kind of fun, and it’s VERY satisfying when you’re done.
(For those curious, I’ve tried having a big load of mulch dumped on our parking pad (to be wheelbarrowed out to the right places), and that works about as well as the bags of mulch for me. Some might find one method easier than the other. Not sure which method is cheaper — the advantage of getting bags of mulch is that it’s an excuse to go to the garden store every few days and get a few more perennials to stick in the ground too (which helps motivate me to keep on with the mulching, if I can plant some pretty flowers at the same time), so the mulch budget gets mixed in with the flower budget.)
