In this case, Opportunity has 8 yards of mulch. A guy is doing tree work in the neighborhood somewhere and is looking for someone to take it off his hands. Since his price is right (free) and since the Missus wants some mulch, I told him to dump it inside the secure perimeter.
But damn, that's going to be a lot of mulch. They say you never get as much mulch as you need; I guess we're going to test that out.
6 comments:
This spring Jennifer and I had 6 cubic yards of mulch delivered. 6 yards, that's not much, is it?
OM*G.
That's a lot of mulch... close to three standard sized pickup beds full. When you're wheelbarrowing that pile around to its eventual resting places, you may discover that nothing in life is "free" :)
Luckily for your back, though, at least its not fill dirt or gravel.
If the guy just bought it and had too much, you're probably okay. But we got some "free" mulch from a neighbor who was moving away and it was infested with carpenter ants. I only just got them out of the house this year.
I actually looked out our tree guy and asked him to bring mulch. He was very hesitant, making sure that I knew what we were getting (straight from the dumptruck that the chipper shot the chippings into, including all the leaves, bark, etc.), and that we knew what a 10-ton truck would do to our lawn and the sidewalk he drove over to dump the load.
I was thrilled to have such an amount, because when we bought by the bag or pickup load my spouse always convinced me that the amount I wanted to purchase was far more than we needed, and then we ended up spreading what we got so thin that the beds and borders looked mulched but weren't really.
So, once the stuff came, it had some amount of leaf stuff that had started to compost in the truck, so there was a little bit of icky factor. There were also a lot of short twigs from chipped branches, and a lot of leaves.
My wife and Mother in law were not happy with the presence of all those twigs and leaves, and were very wary of whether any of the trimmed trees that made up the chippings might have been trimmed on account of some tree disease that might leave spores or virus in the mulch to pass on to our shrubs. I should also point out that decomposing wood-chippings rob nitrogen from the soil, so if you are hoping to have great growth from nitrogen hungry plants in the mulched area, you will need to compensate for that.
We did a really good much job, -- perhaps not as attractive as the more uniform mulch from the garden center, but much more functional in terms of moisture contol and weed suppression. We ended up with perhaps a third of our 6 ton pile left over, and I hired some neighbor hood boys to shift it to make a footpath in the wild woodland behind our yard.
Mulch ado about nothing?
;-)
Just remember this is raw material.
You will need to treat it and watch it around foundations.
It is termite fodder.
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