Saturday, July 12, 2008

Mulch, Glorious Mulch!

I've gotten a TON of work done around the house this week. i'll give it to you in dribs and drabs, but I have to tell you about the mulch...

One of my projects was to deal with this hill in our yard that runs alongside the road . It's about 80 feet long, and about 4 feet high. It's too steep to mow with the mower, and to weed wack it takes way too long. I decided to spray it with Round Up to kill all the grass. Side Note - Round Up Weed & Grass Killer works GREAT!! Then, I figured I would put down some of that weed block sheet stuff, mulch it, and plant some low-lying, low maintenance stuff.

I was not looking forward to buying mulch. It's way too expensive to have it delivered, and I don't have a pick-up or a trailer, so I would have had to borrow one, which was causing a whole other hassle, but anyway...

So, while I'm delaying and delaying, a friend at church last week told me that sometimes if you call your local road department, if they're going to be doing any branch chipping, they'll give you some mulch. Yesterday, I was driving home from Home Depot (deck stairs project, more on that tomorrow) I passed a crew removing branches from around power line. So, I stopped.

Says I, "Hey, what do you guys do with all the mulch after you're done chipping?"
Says the sign-holding guy, "Well, we try to find a place to dump it."
Says I, "Hey! I know a place you can dump it!"
Says the sign-holding guy, "Where?"
Says I, "My house." I write down my address and give it to him.
Says s-h guy, "OK boss, we'll see you in a bit".

This happened at like 10 in the morning, and by 2, they still hadn't come. I was starting to doubt the authority of the sign-holding guy. I was starting to feel like someone who was stood-up on a date...

2:30 rolls around, and here comes the truck! They backed it up the driveway, opened the gate, and dumped the entire contents of the truck in my yard!!! SWEET!!!
and the best part is, IT WAS FREE!!!!!

Ok, so by free, I mean I slipped the 2 guys a few bucks each, and sat down with them and gave them a cold drink, but still..FREE MULCH AND A LOT OF IT!! Here are pictures.

Here comes the truck...

And here's my mulch pile...

That last picture makes it look like the pile is bigger than our truck, but that's just the camera angle. I figured the pile was about 10 feet long x about 5-6 feet wide x about 4 feet high. And free. I spent half the day today spreading it. I estimate I spread about 3-4 yards of it, and the pile is about half gone, so we got somewhere about 7 yards of the stinky stuff. Figure it would have been about $20 per yard, plus $75 delivery, and we got it for a nice tip and 2 cold drinks. And one drink was water, so we didn't even have to pay for that!! :)

Phil. 4:19 - And my God will meet all your needs according to His riches in Christ Jesus...
Thank You, Lord, for free mulch!!!

Oh yeah, and I slew a big snake today...
That's a size 13 boot next to it.



2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Dude! Are you lucky!
Wow! that is one long snake!

Bill said...

Nice job!
Dad