Late last week we arranged for the mulch company to deliver certified playground wood chips for Abby’s new swingset.
On Sunday morning, Abby woke me pretty early, and after being out at my weekly D&D game pretty late, I only had 4 hours of sleep. Berta was already outside doing weeding to get ready for the mulch arrival, and I took a few minutes to remove the fence. I had just come inside and collapsed on the living room floor, when the doorbell rang.
There was a guy outside with 7 cubic yards of playground mulch.
You really have to think about how much mulch that is. I mean, that’s a lot of mulch! That’s 189 cubic feet. That will easily cover a 19’ by 19’ area with 6 solid inches of mulch.
He couldn’t dump it over the retaining wall behind the house because the back end of the truck moves down when it’s dumping. Berta’s idea was to somehow dump it into the garage. Not fancying cleaning the garage of wood chips forever, I told the guy to just dump it along side of the retaining wall. And dump he did.
There was some attempt to rent some kind of machinery to move the mulch, but nobody had a hitch to tow that with. I suppose that whatever vehicle is next purchased should probably be able to tow stuff. You never know when that will be necessary.
Instead, I built a ramp out of three 4x4s and a piece of plywood. After filling up the wheelbarrow I would shoot up the ramp and hopefully make it over the lip of the fence without tumbling down. On several occasions while I was waiting for help at the top to get over that lip, the plywood slid down the rails with me on it. Fun, but not.
Mom and Nana came over to help. I wasn’t pleased with Berta’s doing any lifting in the 90 degree weather, so we sent her inside to keep Abby entertained. The sun was very hot, and we took a long lunchtime break, which is when I really realized that I hadn’t eaten breakfast. We came out to finish the work at 2pm, and managed to get the mulch back off the road onto the skirt of the garage.
It took a total of about 5 hours to move most of the mulch into the yard. Hopefully it all stays in the yard and never needs replaced, ever. Or we move.
