Decomposition

Having spent the last 3 weeks attending 8am meetings (granted, sometimes they were moved to 9 due to protests), I had been anticipating being able to sleep in this morning, as we'd finished with that phase of the project.

Of course, at 8am sharp, the phone rings.  *sigh*  But wait, it's not such a bad thing; it's my favorite arborist's wife, asking if they can dump off a load of mulch with us?  Certainly!  Only thing is, she doesn't know when he'll be coming over, will I be in?  Yes, I said.

So I spent about four hours working on the mulch pile they had left the *last* time (and that was only *half* a truckload!), trying to distribute it under trees that were nearby.  The stuff proved too full of sticks and big pieces to cooperate with a shovel, so it ended up being me, my favorite pair of rose gloves (thank you, Mummy!) and my gardening bucket, back and forth, pushing the stuff into the bucket and hauling it over to the nearby peach tree (repeat 30 times), then using it to fill the wheelbarrow and carting that over to another spot where there's a peach and a little cherry tree.  Got distracted when I realized that it was (if I recalled correctly) a bulb-dividing time of year, so I separated out a couple of clumps of Pink Ladies (which I'm guessing are a type of amaryllis?) and re-planted them a foot or two off to the side, with a scattering of bulb food going into the hole as well, out of charity.  I already had a bag of bulb food from last year (may as well use it), and I figured it was difficult to do harm with it as long as one kept an eye on the quantity and didn't deposit it right next to the bulb.  Did I mention that I got distracted?  This continued as I realized that if I was going to put a thick layer of mulch down, I should probably put fertilizer down underneath it.  Sooo...distributed some tree fertilizer, dug it in, scattered some of the expensive compost around a bit, then dumped two wheelbarrowloads of the arborist's pile on top of it all.

The pile which I had thought I'd neglected redistributing actually showed evidence of a lot of mold growing inside of it, and the smell reminded me of camping a bit.  As in...leaf mold?  Wait, that's a good thing, right?  Decomposition?  I thought I recalled that when making bags of leaves for the purpose of decomposing them, it's a fungal activity that gets the process going.  Hmmm...I resolved that if anyone asked, I'd left the pile on its own for a while to promote composting. :-)

A peach tree only merited half a sack of fertilizer due to its size (according to the directions), so I scattered the other half under another peach (or nectarine?) tree in a corner that had half died, in the hopes that it might someday fruit for me.  I was getting too tired by this point to dig in the stuff, but I did have a wheelbarrowful of compost, so I decided to pile the compost over the fertilizer, depend on tomorrow's rain to sort of satisfy the 'water it in' bit, and move on.

By 2:20pmish I stopped, out of fuel, and here I am.  I haven't heard from the arborist yet, but I think I may have to leave to hunt down some lunch and get my errands done.  Oh yeah, and I think I may need to go buy a second compost bin from the city; I'm doing a bit too well with filling up the first one. :-}

Wait, wasn't this a workday?  Yes; I'm calling this a part-day off for mental and physical health.  I think I needed to get out and feel like I was getting something done rather than just meeting about it, heh.

Thanks for listening.