Like most of humanity, I am a largely inexplicable and highly individual mixture of profligacy and frugality. I think I should only wear the nicest Italian shoes, which are no longeraffordable for the middle class. So I wait like a cat in the bushes watching a bird, until they are discounted to the point that they are at least reachable. Kinda profligate, I know, though the shoes do tend to last 10 years and look extremely pretty all the way. What it is that I am totally cheap about? Mulch. God makes it, in the form of fall leaves and grass clippings. And I DO NOT think I should pay much for it when it surrounds me everywhere.
Heres another confession: I dont always recycle my yogurt containers. The individual packaging is wasteful to begin with, and then sometimes I dont feel like washing them out and just throw them in the trash. On the other hand, there is one ecologically perverse form of commerce that drives me completely crazy: Bagged mulch trucked into the Lowes and Home Depot of my tree-lined city from God knows where. This makes zero sense to me when taking down struggling sugar maples and spruces that have outgrown their yards keeps numerous small business owners, the power company, and the city busy for much of the year. There is a nice tree guy in town who will deliver ten yards of chipped trees for $70. Ten yards is an intimidating mountain.
My problem, however, is that I dont have a parking space for that mountain of sweet-smelling spruce and maple. Ive worn out the patience of my neighbors, too, by suggesting that we share a pile dumped in their yard that I dont get around to moving for a year or so. Of course, fall represents a bounty of unearned riches, as my neighbors assiduously rake the fall leaves OUT of their flower beds and place them in neat paper sacks, which I then collect in my wheel barrow and dump ON my, not coincidentally, much more vigorous and healthy flower beds.
Last fall, however, I was distracted and only managed to collect a dozen bags, when I probably needed 40. What to do? Well, I just noticed sacks of shredded paper at my new office. Free carbon! Looks like mulch, albeit BRITE WHITE mulch. Research suggests that the inks will cause no one to expire, especially not on the flower beds. So Ive been loading up my car with themnow not just the town eccentric, but the office eccentric, tooand spreading them around.
Its quite a striking look. The only challenge is keeping the shredded streamers off the perennials, where they hang around and blow in the breeze, like the dissipated aftermath of one very peculiar party.