It’s springtime, and that means mulch.
I fucking hate mulch.
Is there anything more worthless?
I mean, you go to the trouble to spread this stuff all over your yard, and then it looks nice for, like, ten minutes.
Ten minutes!
Mulch makes me hate living in a house.
Maybe I should live on a boat.
Or in an apartment.
I think I’d like an apartment.
Funny, when I had an apartment, all I wanted was a house.
Now, I have a house, but the house has mulch, so I hate it.
Anyway.
The problem isn’t the mulch itself.
My neighbor, who knows about this stuff, tells me it helps regulate soil temperature and prevent weeds.
Plants like that.
So, okay, maybe it serves a useful purpose.
And it smells good when it’s new. Like warm weather.
And, for the ten minutes it looks nice, it looks really nice.
Makes the yard look tidy.
And if you’re an uptight prick like me, you appreciate tidy.
The problem with mulch is the torment it inflicts upon me every year regarding where to get it and how much to pay.
And, if I go the DIY route, how much pain I’m willing to endure, and for how long, to get the mulch installed.
You don’t spread mulch. You install it.
But whatever.
There are two schools of thought when it comes to mulch.
One, never pay someone to do what you can do yourself.
This is the old-school, Great Depression approach.
Yes, I am physically capable of installing my own mulch.
I’ve had a company dump a huge pile of it in my driveway, which I then wheel-barrowed all over my yard.
I’ve also had Home Depot deliver a pallet of packaged mulch to my house, then carried the bags all over the yard, ripped them open, and spread it around.
Both methods suck.
Especially for my yard.
My house was built into the side of a ravine.
Okay, maybe not a ravine, but I have a ridiculously steep-ass yard.
On three occasions, I’ve had dudes lose control of their stand-behind, wide-deck lawnmowers and go careening into the woods behind my house.
It’s that steep.
And, thanks to my ridiculous yard, I get to enjoy having the occasional needle stuck behind my kneecap.
A couple years ago, I was maneuvering a load of dirt through my back yard.
I felt gravity start to take hold of the wheelbarrow and pull it from my hands.
Screw you, gravity! I said and started to put the brakes on with both feet.
And then I felt something pop in my right knee.
Torn meniscus.
Luckily, it didn’t require surgery.
But it did require that I get some sort of lubricating fluid injected into my knee, right behind my patella.
Which is exactly as much fun as it sounds.
So, you see, my yard doesn’t just suck.
It’s straight-up dangerous.
The second school of thought on mulch, and a variety of other things, is to pay people to do the shit you don’t want to do.
All the productivity books suggest that what’s drudgery for you is pleasurable for someone else.
So, in the market-based economy in which we’re fortunate to live, one can outsource one’s drudgery to someone who actually enjoys, and perhaps even makes a living, doing precisely that which one hates.
Like installing mulch.
It was easy when I lived in Houston.
About the first week of March, dudes with trailers full of mulch would start circling the neighborhood.
You’d get a knock on your door, and one of them would ask if you’d like some.
And they had the good stuff: thick, black, and fragrant.
And because there were competing packs of trailer-hauling mulch dudes roaming the Houston suburbs, it was cheap.
So, you’d say yes, give the guy a couple hundred bucks, and then an entire crew would descend upon your yard and have the mulch installed, to professional standards, in less than an hour.
Easy.
That was Houston.
Here, in Kansas City, you have to call a professional landscaping service.
And that service; having overhead, payroll, and taxes with which to contend; charges you through the frickin’ nose to deliver and install mulch.
I mean, it’s ridiculous . . . like, five times what I paid the dudes in Houston.
And, rather than offer same-day installation, it takes the landscapers a month to get to your yard.
Which is a problem if you procrastinate like I do because you hate mulch so much.
By the time they show up, all the flower beds are already overgrown with weeds, which means the landscapers charge you even more to get them cleaned up.
Total scam.
The long-term solution, of course, is to get rid of the mulch.
I looked into replacing every splinter of the stuff in my yard with Missouri river rock.
The guy from the landscaping company walked me through the entire process.
His crew would re-edge all the flower beds and, in some places, install permanent brick borders to act as mini retaining walls.
He showed me photos of several projects he’d done.
The river rock looked nice. Really nice.
And cost twice as much as my kid’s car.
Twice.
So, no, I won’t be getting any river rock this year.
Or ever.
But I will be paying the landscapers to install more mulch.
Which will look nice for ten minutes.
And then go back to looking like shit.
I don’t intend to stay in this house forever.
And if I don’t get my boat or apartment and have to live in another house,
I won’t give a damn about bedrooms or square footage or hardwood floors.
Nope.
My criteria is simple.
Mulch, or no mulch?
That. Is. The question.