On February 1, I became a vegetarian.

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New York was a lot of fun, even if I did get the swine flu while I was there. Hopefully, we’ll have some pictures up soon.

For the past couple of weeks, I have made it a personal agenda to give our yard a makeover. Since we bought the house, there have been things that I haven’t been able to change to fit my liking. Much of that had to do with the fact that it just plain gets hot in Alabama in the summer. Also, it was pretty overwhelming…I’d say about 60 percent of our yard area was covered with leaves prior to this. That included all of our beds in the front yard and the vast majority of the back yard as well. The back yard was a combination of this ugly gray “forest floor” effect, bare earth where nothing could make headway, overgrown areas of weeds, vines, and some small plants, and some grass struggling to grow amidst the wild violets that had made major inroads in our yard.

Now, as some of you know, I’m not afraid of yard work. I have a long history with it. I can tell you stories of hauling dirt around the yard, creating new beds from scratch on summer Saturdays, planting literally over a hundred red tops along the perimeter of my parents’ yard…the list goes on and on. Somewhere during that time I figured out that I actually kind of enjoyed it. I learned pretty quickly, though, that I would enjoy it more when it was actually my yard that was the one being worked on.

Well, the years passed, and we finally got around to the part of our major purchase list that involved the yard. You’ve already heard about the chipper/shredder, which I have put to good use creating leaf mulch (home improvement stores call it “soil conditioner” and sell it for $3 a bag). Well, last Wednesday evening I took it up a notch. That was when the dump truck from the landscape materials company came to my driveway, not once, not twice, but three times with a load of mulch. According to a home improvement website, a cubic foot of pine bark mulch weighs about 22.5 pounds. This was 24 cubic yards – over seven tons of mulch.

I finished spreading it Friday evening. Ready to see the results? (By the way, these pictures are 80-100K each, so if you’re still on dial-up, it’ll be slow…)

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• Hours worked in the yard: 7 1/2.
• Flower beds de-leaved: 2.
• Piles of leaves/sticks/whatever previously created that were mulched: 8.
• Beds that were completely filled: 2.
• Beds incompletely filled: 2.
• Bags of leaf-based mulch created: approximately 20.
• Retail value of said bags: probably around $60.
• Bags of stick-based mulch created: 2.
• Retail value of said bags: probably around $15.
• Value of having the leaves they were created from gone from the yard: much more than $75.
• Kiddie pools used to hold stick-based mulch: 1.
• Of the chipper and shredder, number of features I’m happy with on the new tool: 1. (Ed: The chipper takes way too long to deal with – lots of clogging to have to work around. Or maybe I just don’t know what I’m doing.)
• Mosquito bites: 2. (The yard spray works!)
• Yellow jacket nests found: 1. (Luckily, I wasn’t stung.)
• Hottest temperature worked in: 97 degrees.
• Rocks accidentally put down the shredder chute: over 500, counting pebbles.
• Times I stopped the machine just to clear out rocks from the shredder chute: 3.
• How much better the back yard looks, in terms of percentage: 90%. (I still need to get pine straw or mulch down around my trees, and there’s still too many overgrown and weedy areas for my taste, but at least the piles of junk are gone. Overall, very pleased with the outcome of the time spent.)