The Mulch of Life
I’ve gotten through my life very nicely without mulch up until now. You may recall that last year I made the logical, but ill-conceived decision to hire a horticulturalist for an advisory session. The cost of the advice was about the same as two days worth of hard garden work by Joventino or his father Benito. It turned out to be worth considerably less, 30% because of the extremely hard-working nature of Joventino and Benito, and 70% due to the inane thought that there exists an expert who can survey my property and garden and give valuable recommendations as to how best to manage the plant life on this hilltop estate. At the time I was having a water crisis brought on by a particularly dry summer and the consternation brought on by the remembrance of the warning of the prior owner and Uber-gardener to NOT over-water the cacti and succulents. This seems to be a widely held view by succulent gardeners. My niece, who recently took on the task of designing and planting six large bowls of succulents spread out around our property, used the expression that succulents thrive on neglect. But then, first my irrigation guy and then my arborist (a.k.a. my tree guy) told me they thought I might be killing some of my succulents for lack of water. I now have an app-based irrigation control system with twenty-one zones. I have decided that over-watering beats under-watering…right up until it doesn’t.
One of the things that the horticulturalist said to me that was most memorable had to do with weeds and the use of mulch. He said that people don’t understand that there is no way to win the war against weeds. If you kill them chemically, you risk thwarting anything else from growing. If you chop at them with something like a weed-eater, you are just pruning them for superior growth. If you pull them by hand you spread the seeds of 40+ other weeds in the pulling and thus get nothing more than an ephemeral pleasure from their temporary absence. And don’t think weed barriers will save you, since weeds just lie in wait underneath and find a way to come through to the sunlight one way or another. He felt that there was only one solution for the weed problem and that was a minimum of four inches of high-quality mulch.
He and I had the opportunity to discuss the finer points of mulch before I booted him from the hilltop roster (It takes a lot…or should I say a total absence of value, to get fired off this hilltop), he told me that there was all sorts of quality gradations of mulch that has to do with its organic composition, its nutrient value, its particulate size and the amount of unwanted debris in it. I started my foray into the world of mulch with two purchases. I bought some bags of large chunk bark to put around the base of the citrus trees, and I bought some more traditional bales of mulch to mix with the potting soil for the garden planting we were undertaking. When I underestimated how much bark mulch I would need (we ALWAYS underestimate mulch purchases) and returned to the garden store, I was told that we were at the end of bark mulch season and that more shipments would not come again until Spring. That got me to buy some low-grade red-dyed bark mulch at Home Depot that looks like it belongs at Disneyland. That will never happen again.
The next time I went into the mulch market it was the real deal. I bought twelve yards in twelve superbags from my rock store. They delivered it and lined the massive white bags up along my lower driveway. This was high-grade mulch that smelled like a cedar closet. If it didn’t look so strange, I would have started each morning by putting my head into one of those superbags for an invigorating start to my gardening day. I told Joventino to put it along the driveway and anywhere else it was needed. I was worried that I had overdone it and in the process had over-taxed poor Joventino, but alas, the bags were empty by noon and I could barely see where it had all gone.
The next time the topic of mulch came up it was my neighbor Winston who brought it up. He had decided that he needed lots of mulch and didn’t want to pay for it. He explained that there was a mulch cooperative online where you registered as a mulch taker and then arborists and gardeners who create mulch through their wood-chipping activities delivered their effluent to where you wanted the mulch rather than to pay a dumping fee. This seemed too good to be true and when I went to the cooperative website I began to understand why. Apparently you had to ask that your mulch not include things like candy wrappers and low-grade ground vegetation such as palm fronds. Supposedly, getting the wrong mulch could do more harm than good for your garden. My high-priced mulch from the rock store was looking better by the minute. Nevertheless, Winston kept coming after me like a mulch pusher trying to turn me into a mulch junkie. He seemed to want to include me in his buy. He would take 15 yards and I would take 5, and it would all get dumped on the street in front of our respective houses. We waited for the good stuff patiently.
Finally, Winston called and excitedly told me that our neighbor (next to me and across from him) had a trucking business and had access to good mulch (no questions asked). It was dumped as prescribed at no cost. The 20 yards disappeared into our yards. Then, the other day I got another call from Winston. He was ordering another 25 yards. He would use 20 and give me 5. The poor guy had a serious mulch problem. And this time there was no freebie. It would cost me $32 for my piece of the stash. I folded two twenties and slid it into Winston’s hand as the truck driver was jiggling the truck bed into dropping my 5 yards on the road. It was actually steaming hot, which made me think there was a blend of other stuff in with the mulch. It so happened that Joventino was here today, so my 5 yards disappeared almost immediately into my back hillside among the ice plants. Kim told me it smelled like her Uncle Hubert’s pig farm in Indiana, which made sense, given the steam and all that.
I invited Winston over for an In & Out Burger with the guys (yes, they are still working on the deck) and tried to understand where the mulch had come from, but he was not divulging. He had seen Joventino’s ability to dispatch a pile of mulch in no time at all. He asked if Joventino had any time to give him when he finished with me. Now I know Joventino is in big demand so I barged into the conversation (which was easy to do since Winston speaks no Spanish and I am semi-fluent at least with gardener Spanish). I told Joventino to wrap up my yard by 3pm (there is a limitless amount of time he can spend in my garden so two hours more or less makes no difference) and to give Winston the last two hours of my time (Joventino starts promptly at 7am and works a full 10 hours).
When I last saw Joventino, he was shoveling mulch in front of Winston’s house and had already put a dent in the pile. I had paid Joventino for a full day’s pay (I am a sucker for a hard working Mexican like Joventino), but I told him that if Winston offered him money, to just take it. My treat to Joventino for accommodating my mulch dealer.