The Great Mulch Project

In a gallant effort to save money this year on our spring yard work, I went on a mulch mission to have a truck load delivered straight to our house in lieu of buying the small bags that overloaded our car on three separate trips to Home Depot last year.  First of all, let me ask if you know how many different kinds of mulch there are?!  Holy Toledo has it become apparent that I know little about landscaping from my mulch project 2011.  Some companies that I researched had at least a dozen different kinds of mulch from different materials and in different colors.  I was almost embarassed to call and ask for more information about "plain brown mulch".

Ok, this angle doesn't do the pile justice...it's large. Trust me.

At long last, I got my courage up and after attempting to figure out how much mulch really needed, I called three different local companies for prices and delivery dates.  I wanted to buy local to help out my hometown business owners and I found a great company that only sold one type (and color) of mulch for a great price and they delivered on Saturdays.  Their mulch was recycled, so it was all the better.

This tree is going bye, bye but the bed behind it and in front of the porch were just two of the ones to be re-mulched.

Two days later the mulch arrived.  Oh. My. Gosh.  What was I thinking?!  As a dump truck dumped ten cubic yards of mulch on half of our driveway I realized I pretty much grossly overcalculated the amount of mulch I'd need. OOPS!  Our neighbor saw what was happening and told us later on he had a good chuckle.  I did try to use a mulch calculator a friend had sent me, but I think I estimated too much in my head (the bed lengths and widths) and probably did the conversion to cubic yards wrong.  Alas, after my husband teased me, rolled his eyes, and then chuckled we shared our stock pile of mulch with my in-laws for two of their homes and two of our neighbors and some good did come of it.  Next year, we'll be purchasing less mulch but we're going to do it in bulk again and all our neighbors are going to chip in with us and order it at once. 

The tulips were just coming up in this photo, but I'll be mulching under this fence now and planting more bulbs.

So, my goofball math mistake (and to think I'm an accountant?!) led to some great neighborly bonding. :)  The pile is almost gone now and five homes have been fully mulched from said monster mulch pile.  We even have some in bags in our garage stock piled for after we remove/replace the trees in our front yard that we hate.  More to come about that in another post.  I'm even adding mulch in under the fence in our front yard where we planted a ton of tulips last fall.

Oh, and do not be disappointed!  Operation vegetable garden 2011 is underway and I will be posting about my new method of planting madness in a post to come.