The Pleasure of Life
How much mulch would a…
Chuck Hansen

I married Stacy 14 years ago this April, and not long after, she introduced me to gardening. Actually, she does the gardening. She introduced me to mulching.

I wasn't much of a mulcher when I met Stacy. Most of my adult life I'd lived in city apartments with sidewalks for front yards or rented houses where I didn't even pick the beer cans off the grass, much less tend to the flora.

At first it was no big deal. We lived in a Cape Cod in Lakeside (that's north of the river, but it's nice just the same), and I could mulch our entire garden area with a couple of bags from Southern States.

But that's not really mulching. Real mulching began a couple years later when we bought a new house in Midlothian, complete with fragile bushes planted right up against the house and a yard defined by six-inch-deep bulldozer ruts and random slabs of concrete protruding from the hard clay. It looked like a tank battle had been fought around the house.

"We gotta mulch," Stacy observed as we surveyed the yard.

"OK," I said naively. "I'll run down to Southern States and get some. How many bags?"

That was the day that my unit of measurement for mulch went from "bags" to "yards," which is like going from finger sandwiches to Wendy's Baconators.

That first year we got eight yards of mulch. The mulch guy delivered it in a small dump truck. I looked at the pile of glorified dirt in the street next to our house and asked the guy, "How do I know that's eight yards?"

"Cause that's how much you ordered," the mulch guy replied.

I paid the man and started mulching, pitch forking the stuff into a little one-wheeled wheelbarrow and humping it up our short, steep driveway to the bushes. It was easy then - just dump it and spread it with a rake - no emerging bulbs or early flowers to worry about. After about 100 trips the garden was mulched, and the sun was still up. Not so bad.

By the next spring Stacy had done wonders with the gardens, and we ordered 10 yards of mulch. The truck was a little bigger, the pile was a little bigger and the check was a little bigger. I still managed to get it all moved by the end of the day though, and it looked nice around the plants Stacy had begun nurturing.

Within a few years Stacy had the yard looking like a botanical garden, and we were up to 12 yards of mulch and a two-wheeled, large-capacity wheelbarrow. I thought this fancy wheelbarrow was a waste of money until I made one trip up our increasingly steep driveway carrying three times the normal load with just one hand (two wheels up front means no balancing). I LOVE that wheelbarrow. If there were a fire in our house, I'd carry our kids out of the flames in that wheelbarrow, just to be sure the thing was safe. The kids too, of course.

Nowadays we've got more biodiversity than the Amazon rainforest, to the point that we now order 15 yards of mulch. The mulch is not out of the street within a day though. Or two days. Or, so far this year, two weeks. It's a big, huge pile of mulch. I don't bother asking the dump truck driver whether he brought the full 15 yards because I'm secretly hoping he's ripping us off and delivering only 12 or 13 yards.

Even with the large-capacity wheelbarrow, I have to make many, many trips between the pile and the various gardens around our house, and as I do, I am amazed at what Stacy's done with the dry clay canvas we acquired 10 years ago. I had some ideas that it would be green, and there'd be flowers and bushes and stuff… but I could never have imagined how lush and rich a garden she would create, particularly from what, in retrospect, was a pretty barren start.

And sometimes I look at Stacy and me, and what we've put together over our 14 years, and I get exactly the same feeling of amazement. I knew when we got married that Stacy was pretty and that marriage would be nice and that kids would be rewarding. But I just could not have conceived how rich and deep and meaningful our life together would be. Looking back, our marriage was a seed, or a bulb, and I didn't have the slightest idea that this tiny little sprout of a relationship could grow to be so strong, and for that matter, so fun.

Yeah, it's been a lot of work. But the beauty of the garden we have created has been worth every bit of it.