Mulch

Lucky me: I got to do yard work yesterday. It's one of my least favorite things; I'd rank it right above camping, because yard work is over in a couple of hours, but you're stuck in a tent for a whole night, or worse.

Last year, our landlord let the back yard get really overgrown. We tried to tame it with a weed whacker, but it was just too dense and thick. After he finally took care of it, I thought he might hire someone to maintain it. Instead, during the winter he told us he was going to make it maintenance-free. In the spring he had a load of mulch delivered and spread it over the grass. But the weeds grew right back, because he didn't lay down a barrier layer of landscape fabric, like you're supposed to. This year's excessive rain didn't help.

I told him the yard was getting overgrown again, and he needed to come by and deal with it. He put it off, and the weeds grew. When the biggest ones got close to my height, I sent him a photo. He finally came by a couple of weeks ago and cleared everything, and put down some landscape fabric. Last week he had another load of mulch delivered and he came by and covered the fabric with it, so we probably won't have any more weed issues.

After he'd cleared all the weeds and dirt, he put everything into heavy-duty plastic bags and left them by the curb, but last week the trash truck didn't take them. He didn't close the bags, so the contents got wet. Meanwhile, this week is the monthly yard waste pickup, but they won't take anything unless it's in barrels or those brown paper yard bags. Like a sucker, I told him that if he got us some of the paper bags, I'd transfer the yard waste from the plastic bags.

So that was my chore yesterday. There were half a dozen trash bags, and I ended up using one paper bag for each one, plus one more for a pile that for some reason he'd left in the back yard. The toughest part was keeping the bags balanced, because he had pulled everything out including roots, so there were these big, heavy, wet clumps of dirt and root balls and long, wet weeds that caused the bags to tip over. I just wanted to do the right thing and make sure the waste gets properly taken away and turned into mulch, or whatever it is they do with it.