Last week, I spent $116 on bark mulch.
Pretty much chunks of wood in assorted sizes and shades of “fir/hemlock brown”.
For $116, I’m thisclose to somehow melding the wood chunks together and wearing it (couture!) so I have something to show for it.
I guess I do have something to show for it, you just wouldn’t be able to tell for all of my whining about it.
When we bought our house, it was winter. So everything, save for the cedar hedges and shrubs, was dead. I’ve always lived in houses with yards, and usually ones with large gardens, and they never seemed to have huge weed issues. I mean, we’d be out there a few times a year pulling weeds, but that was the extent of it.
Imagine my chagrin when the weeds in our gardens had grown as tall as me and had eaten up 80% of my weekend time by needing to be pulled.
While J was on the roof laying new shingles, I was pulling weeds, digging up dirt, hauling buckets, raking, shoveling, and overturning tons of surprises. Usually those surprises were bugs, but I did happen to find a tomb for what I can only assume is a dead animal, since it’s a concrete block that says “We love you Cocoa”.
In any case, I couldn’t handle the weeds anymore so got on the internet and did some research to find out how to get rid of them once and for all. Apparently landscaping fabric and either gravel or mulch is the way to go, and since I’m not into sacrificing that much of my time for $116 + the cost of fabric, I bit the bullet and ordered a heap of mulch to our door step.
After that, it took us ages to dig out some more weeds (there’s this one weed that just won’t go away and tries to choke out the other plants in our garden), lay the fabric, pin it into the soil, and haul bark mulch back and forth to cover it.
Now we just have to do the same for the other hundreds of square feet of garden we have in the yard. At least this will save us from a painful amount of weeding next year.
Excuse the fabric and the hose in the picture. Oh, and the window glare. The shrubbed part went from looking weedy, like the planters on the right in the photo (those are next up on the mulching block) to weed free.
This will all add to our curb appeal and therefore property value. Two houses in our neighborhood just went up for sale for more than we bought ours for, and they are substantially smaller, on smaller lots, and not renovated. I’m sure they will sell for less than what they are listed for, but another recently sold for more than we bought ours for and it was, similarly, not as large/updated. So that’s good news. Not that we’ll be selling for a long, long time.
So that’s what I’ve been working on!
We spent $80 or so on mulch for our townhouse last weekend and it took a lot of fun time to lay it all down. We didn’t put the weed guard down, but we did make sure the mulch was a the correct depth to choke out the weeds.
Ahh weeds. My fiance runs his own landscaping business, and he says that fabric/newspaper + mulch is the only way to keep them down. You’ll still have to weed a few times a year, but it won’t be the free for all like before, good luck!
It looks very nice. It costs money to do proper landscaping but it will make you house sell that much faster when you’re ready. The fabric is the only way to go.
Oops, your house.
We don’t have a lawn or even a patio. It’s one of the things that just didn’t fit into our budget. It was 2-bedroom with no outdoor space or one bed with outdoor space and we picked the former. I hope some day we’ll have a lawn so we can be burdened with weeding 😉 Lawn looks lovely!
Tis the season, eh? We did a whole whack of weeding last weekend and then it rained cats and dogs for five days straight. We officially have a dandelion jungle – how does it grow so damn fast? I’m going to look into the mulch idea though – anything that stops the weed madness is worth a second look.
Your yard is looking good though! I would love to import you in to work your yard miracles here. 😉
Gardening projects seem to always cost a lot of money. Every time I go to Home Depot or Lowe’s, it ends up costing me $100-200 just for little stuff. By the way, using landscaping fabric for weeds is a smart idea. I do it in my backyard and it works like a charm 🙂
I use Preen to weed proof my garden. I have to spread it once every few months but it does a pretty good job!
Ha! Nice to see your bark mulch in action 😉 it looks great though, seriously!
Nice. You have a really nice garden. It’s so green and healthy. Yeah, you would definitely spend money on it but it increases your house’s value.
If you have ever done any gardening you are probably familiar with that terrible black “weed-stop” fabric that is often used. If you have ever had to remove a flower bed or just do a little renovation, this same fabric has probably been on the receiving end of an impressive string of four letter words. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, suffice it to say that after a nuclear attack, the only thing that will exist besides cockroaches and Twinkies is this fabric. Ironically, to be so durable it doesn’t stop weeds all that well. Go figure. Because I hate this fabric so much, I was excited to learn that a considerable number of people avoid it by using newspaper instead. I put the newspaper over the dirt 3-4 pages thick and then covered it with mulch. The newspaper will prevent any grass and weed seeds from germinating, but unlike fabric, it will decompose after about 18 months. By that time, any grass and weed seeds that were present in the soil on planting will be dead. It’s green, it’s cheaper than fabric, and when you decide to remove or redesign the bed later on, you will not have the headache you would with fabric.