Mount Mulchmore

One our perpetual summer projects is acquiring and distributing mulch around the yard, to help with weed suppression and generally improve the appearance of the yard. Earlier in the spring, I had a request in with GetChipDrop.com for wood chips, hoping to get a free (or close to free, with optional donation) supply of wood chips to mulch the yard. ChipDrop partners with local arborists and gardeners to mutual benefit: the arborists get somewhere local to drop the wood chips, and the gardeners don’t have to call every tree company or outright purchase mulch. It’s a simple process, but it doesn’t mean the availability of wood chips is sporadic. Each request is good for a month, and when we returned from the Canary Islands without having received wood chips, I bit the bullet and ordered mulch from a local supplier. (To be clear, their mulch is fabulous… but mulch is not cheap.)

A pile of mulch - approximately 10 cubic yards - in the driveway
Mulch pile 3-May
A smaller pile of mulch - maybe 5 cubic yards - in the driveway
Mulch pile 10-May
A view of the vegetable garden looking towards the back of the house with fresh mulch surrounding the raised beds. A pair of chairs and a couple rain barrels - one painted as a yellow minion with blue pants and a single eye - linger in the middle.
A freshly mulched area
A gigantic pile of mulch - about 15 cubic yards, delivered on top of the remaining couple yards from the first batch - in the driveway
Mulch pile 24-May

The initial distribution wave went quickly – from delivery on May 3rd to the second photo on May 10th, we probably distributed half of the mulch. This was the easy phase, re-mulching areas that were mulched in previous years. You can see how good the fresh mulch looked around the raised vegetable beds. We have a large yard and progressed fairly quickly through those initial 10 cubic yards. I was quickly becoming concerned with other areas of the garden I wanted to mulch as I ran through the pile.

So, before clearing the entire pile, I placed a new request through GetChipDrop.com on a Friday… and received a response Saturday morning asking if I wanted a 15-yard delivery. Woot! It wasn’t until partway through distributing the refreshed pile that I named it “Mount Mulchmore.”

The process inevitably slowed, between some intolerably warm weather, my wasted time at PT, and our discussions as to which areas needed weeding before mulching and which should have landscape paper set down first. I expanded the back border to put more distance between myself and the poison ivy lingering under the neighbor’s white mulberry tree. And then, in mid-August, after mulching around the strawberry bed, I cleared the rest of the pile.

I need more mulch. Yes, I have a request in.