Much Much Mulch

I do love my gardens, though at the moment I am wondering why.  My sister and I are both avid gardeners, slowly turning our respective yards into more garden than lawn.  We both also have dogs, too, though she doesn't have quite the zoo I have.  Given that we grew up in a family that didn't have dogs or cats and didn't do a whole lot of gardening, I find it interesting that she and I both have multiple dogs and share such a passion for gardens.  I'm not quite sure what that says about nurture versus nature.

My sister, however, pays people to mulch her mini arboretum.  I, sadly, do not.

This is what I came home to on Friday afternoon:

Yikes.  That is four cubic yards of mulch.  Or as my friend M put it, it's "much much mulch".  My father observed that I would likely need the National Parks Service to do an archaeological study on the pile before I'd be allowed to excavate it.

What else to do but buckle down and start working?  Pulling weeds, planting new plants, putting down organic fertilizers, pruning, and yes, mulching.  Approximately 3 hours on Friday, 5 on Saturday, and, after coffee and Advil for breakfast, another 5 on Sunday later, and I've made a slight dent in the pile.  I still have a loooong way to go.  Lots more mulching and edging.  I don't know that my arms have ever felt quite as heavy as they do at the moment.  I'm not sure I'll be able to walk tomorrow.

I didn't take too many before pictures - it didn't really occur to me.  Here's an idea of how things generally looked at the beginning of the weekend though.

Weedy.  Messy.  And needing work.

I find the big comprehensive shots of the gardens difficult to capture, but a few "after" shots, for the parts of the gardens that happen to be more done than not.

So, given that gardens are an obscene amount of work, why DO I have so danged many?  I really don't know.  I can't seem to help it.  After a weekend of bone-grinding labor my house is a wreck, I have no clean clothes, I have no food cooked for the week and I still have a lot more garden work to do. But I'll just keep planting more of them.  Because I'm me.

I find I'm a haphazard gardener.  I can be absolutely ruthless in some respects.  I ripped out all sorts of tulips that were in bloom because they look messy.  I murdered probably 1,000 baby maple saplings.  I wrenched grape hyacinths out of the ground by the fist full because they annoy me.  Yet I'll stop digging to relocate an earthworm, laboriously rescued the baby tulip tree I found in one garden, and left very messy sprigs of random myrtle and lily of the valley where I found them, because I have a soft spot for those particular plants.  Ah well.  My gardens will always have their own quirky charm with me as their master.

Finally, I shall leave you with a set of general garden pictures.  Because I can't resist once I have my camera in hand.