Mulch Period

Deckzilla After my Wife's Flowerizing

My wife has never seen a piece of terrain that she doesn’t imagine turning into a flower garden. This is sometimes at odds with my own view that we should have a least part of our yard covered with grass. I know this is in direct odds with my stated aversion to mowing said lawn but logic is not a firm player in this discussion. I am of course drastically overstating the issue but that’s kind of what I do here. The genesis for this discussion came about yesterday when I was returning home for lunch and ran into my wife heading out on a bee line for the Christmas Tree Shoppe. We stopped in the middle of the street and lowered windows to pass on greetings. She told me that I was bound to be proud of her and to look onto our back yard hill. With that warning she blithely headed out towards one of her favorite hunting grounds.

The Backyard Terraces Fully Mulched
New Garden on the Left Side

I found that she had stripped the grass from the hillside next to the back yard garden terraces and planted something that I’m sure will flower. I wasn’t too upset because getting the lawnmower up the hillside was a confirmed pain in the ass. My Favorite Panamanian’s concerns about rainfall and the attendant possibilities of erosion were not part of the calculation. Those mundane details are left to me. I had a dozen bags of mulch earmarked for the terrace gardens that went first to this new garden area. Once I got on a roll and wanting to seize on the opportunity to work unsupervised I continued lugging the mulch up the hill until my supply was exhausted. The only problem was that only half the terraces were finished and the problem with mulching is that it is either all or nothing, at least from a visual perspective. Since my wife was gallivanting around the countryside with the Highlander my Camry was forced into serviced for the mulch run to Home Depot.

I was really proud of the little guy as he handled a vastly over weighted load for the trip back up the hill although I was careful to avoid any protuberance more than 2 inches above the road since that was the clearance the bottom of the car was operating with. I stopped on the way up the hill to pick up my work gloves which I’d left on top of the car prior to departing and found about a quarter mile from the house.

Front Yard is Coming in

I had finished the mulch and was just finishing up watering our emerging lawn when my wife excitedly returned from her shopping foray. Apparently the Christmas Tree Shoppe had a plentitude of granddaughter appropriate gift ideas and my Favorite Panamanian is genetically incapable of resisting buying something for each of them. She was suitably impressed with the work I’d accomplished which is probably why I did it in the first place. The emerging lawn combined with my wife’s annual efforts at “flowerizing” Deckzilla has the yard in pretty good shape for the arrival of summer entertaining opportunities. She’s even conceived and I installed three climbing vines coming out of dug in flower pots with the bottoms cut out. I’m thinking Pinterest was involved in that concept.

The Climbing Vines