Mulching 101

I often wonder if we put undo pressure on ourselves to get so much accomplished on weekends. Does everyone do this? Here we are at the end of another weekend and I sit here exhausted and a little sunburn from working my tail off. I feel good when I get something done. Especially something that has been bugging me. I spent the whole weekend mulching the garden. Sounds like an easy task right? Yea, that's what I thought. You know, just take some hay and plop it around the plants. No, it was a lot of back breaking work and I strained some muscles that I wasn't even aware I had.

As I mentioned in a previous post, the garden had been taken over by weeds. Not just little things but big, honkin weeds that made you go "Is that a stalk of corn or is that a weed?". If you blurred your eyes when you looked at the garden it just looked like part of the lawn. Not good. So I loaded up five old nasty rotten bales of hay that had been sitting outside for about two years and hauled them back to the garden. By the way, old nasty rotten bales of hay work awesome for mulching. That is if you don't mind a little (and when I say "a little" I mean a lot) of mold. I probably inhaled a pound of mold spores. Mmmm tasty. Oh well, I'm just happy to have found a new and useful home for the old hay. It took nearly two days but I successfully weeded and mulched 900 square feet of garden. And I'll be the first to admit I'm pretty sure I bit off more than I can chew for my first attempt at vegetable gardening.