RAISED BED MULCH IS DONE

I can say, without hesitation, that this has been THE single hardest thing I've ever done at our farm.  It took two full days to get it all done.  I have blisters on my hands (even with gloves), my arms and shoulders are sore and my legs feel like I've run a marathon.  But we're so happy with the end result.

My boss said something funny to me in a text when I sent him a picture.  He said "the smell of mulch is really nice, but after a few yards of shoveling, the smell of a cold beer is even better".  I'm not a beer person but now I totally understand, ha.

Friday morning, about 9am, the truck showed up and dump ten cubic yards of black mulch into the yard in front of the garden.  After using a regular shovel for an hour, I walked down to 2nd Family's house and asked if I could borrow a pitchfork.  There's a twist on borrowing a cup of sugar!  That helped immensely.  I would work for about 50 minutes, then take a break on the porch for 10 minutes and then start up again.  All day. I lost count of cart fillings.  The first day I got the entire garden area, about 1300 square feet, at least covered.  But that was only about 60% of the pile.

Side note, when it was delivered on Friday, it was a very cool morning.  After the truck left, I noticed steam coming off the mulch.  It was pretty neat to witness.

It was just a matter of filling the cart and then rolling it into the garden, and dumping it out, over and over and over again.  Then I used a rake (and later, my foot) to spread it around. 

On the second day, we bought this awesome 10-tine pitchfork, it was absolutely invaluable in finishing the project (it scooped about three times as much at a time).  Between that and the Rubbermaid cart we bought a few weeks back, the job was much easier to finish.

Before we unveil the end result of all the hard work, let's remind you of what it looked like when I started.  The strip down the middle was where I didn't put the weed block cloth because I knew I'd be running the cart back and forth with the mulch in it.  So after that was done in the rest of the garden, I put the weed fabric down and mulched the center section.

BEHOLD:

Raised bed garden mulched

The entrance to our garden in all it's mulched glory!

Black mulch

This is the back to front view.

Raised vegetable beds

Garlic/Shallot bed, herb bed, eggplant/pepper bed, and tomato bed.  The last bed at the far right of the photo will be a squash bed.

Black mulch around raised beds

The seven beds in this photo will still need to be irrigated and have some more soil and compost put in so they will become future expansion.

I had a friend of the farm email me and ask why we used all this beautiful mulch on the ground and not in the beds and was it going to be wasted just being on the pathways on top of the weed block fabric?  Great question that might help others as well.  First, we will be adding mulch around the veggies but probably not this.  This is dyed black and while it's a natural dye, we aren't sure if that would affect anything growing.  As for the mulch, we had a decision to make.  With the enclosed garden, mowing and/or edging grass was a mess.  It grew fast, it spread weeds into the beds and it was just too difficult.  We had to put something down between the beds.  Gravel was a choice but it was very expensive and after all this, I can't even imagine putting hundreds of shovels full of gravel down in the same way, ha.  The mulch came in natural, which we thought was kind of blah.  It came in red, which they overuse down these parts in shopping center and fast food flowerbeds.  That left black.  They were all the same price.  We chose black.  Cedar was a choice but it was twice as much as the regular.  This is a great quality shredded mulch.

We like to think of this area like a flower bed.  In your flower bed, you mulch around your pretty bushes so that they are the star of the show (and keep weeds to a minimum in the process).  Here, the raised beds (and veggies growing in them) are the stars and we want them to stand out as well.

It's such a relief to have this done.  I'm not sure how long it will look this beautiful but for now, we are so pleased with the end result.