Still Life, With Cats

I loathe yardwork. Words cannot adequately express how much I hate doing it.

And yet, once or twice a year, there is nothing else to do but suck it up and go out into the front yard and deal with it.

Today was that day. Whee.

We used to have grass (or rather, weeds that vaguely resembled grass once mowed) in the front yard, but three years ago we ripped out the whole front yard and replaced it with drought-tolerant landscaping. And by ‘we’, I mean we paid someone a large sum of money to do it, because see above for the loathing of yard work. The bonus of having a drought-tolerant yard is that it is usually far less maintenance than grass, but no amount of ground cover will prevent the weeds from eventually making their way through.

Richard’s been congested and wheezy the last couple days so he stayed inside, out of range of all the the allergens, and worked on other household chores. I, meanwhile, grabbed a bucket, and headed out to the front yard to do battle with the weeds.

Two hours later, the yard was (mostly) weed free. After that, we decided to take a ‘break’ from house work and headed off to Home Depot to pick up some new mulch.

They laid down a lovely bed of black bark, three years ago when we first had the landscaping put in. We haven’t added any since, so yard’s been starting to look a bit bare. Conveniently Home Depot was having a sale – buy 5 for $10 – so we bought 5 bags and headed home to get back to work.

Hah. Those 5 bags were not close to enough. I stayed beyond to keep spreading out the mulch while Richard headed back to fill the trunk back up again. Five more bags, and nope, still not quite enough, so back we went for one more round. Turns out it takes 15 bags (or 30 cubic feet) of mulch to cover our entire front yard, and I suspect we probably ought to have actually laid down more, except laying down 15 bags was tedious enough and did I already mention that I really, really loathe working in the yard?

But at least the front yard is clean and tidy, and with the new mulch it looks quite nice (although the bar was pretty low, considering the sheer volume of weeds). We showered off the dirt and grime from the day’s work and headed off to our favorite local English pub, where Richard had fish and chips and I had an absolutely incredible vegetarian pasty topped with welsh rarebit sauce. And now I can rest easy for another year and ignore the front yard completely like I normally do, until it’s time to do it all over again.

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