After the year-end feasts & holidays, I need exercise.  So how can I avoid that stinky gym?

Consider this:

• The garden has died back for the winter,  and there’s a little more elbow room in those beds & borders.
• The soil is soft enough to make dandelion digging fun & effective.
• The last few scattered leaves give the garden a kind of messy look.

What to do?
MULCH !!

Mulching is for:

• protecting tender roots & shoots from the cold
• fertilizing the beds
• giving the garden that ready-for-spring look

Fish compost is my choice of mulch.  And yes, there’s usually a little fishy smell that lingers for a week or so… So now’s a good time, considering most of the neighborhood is staying indoors.  🙂

Plus, I’d rather not have that ocean odour in the spring garden when we’re wanting to smell the flowers.

It might be a bit early for spreading  compost because seasonal rains may leach some nutrients away, but the garden is most open now.  It’s faster to lay mulch without having to spread it carefully around spring growth.

As this garden features many winter bulbs, it’s nice to have the tidiest beds showing the early flowers to their best.

Before I know it, weeds will be popping up too.  Covering their seeds NOW will slow them down & save me hours of weeding in spring.

Inspecting the beds gives me a chance to easily spot & remove the few weeds that are still around.  I take a close look at what’s really happening in the garden:

• Bulbs are already poking out of the ground &

  

  snowdrops are starting to bloom.

• Sedum Autumn Joy is just showing signs of returning for the year.
• The delicate looking flower of the Cyclamen Coum is making its appearance.

Preparing for the delivery of a BIG pile of black gold, I spread a big tarp on the driveway, keeping enough tarp aside for protecting it all from rain.  (This mulch is otherwise pretty light!)

This year we had 5 yards of mulch delivered.  It was an intimidating pile indeed.  No question it was all needed in the gardens, but it would take some effort getting it there.   🙂

I paced myself, by moving about 1 yard each afternoon.

The many ice cream buckets & yogurt containers I’d tucked away particularly for this chore, came out of the depths of the shed.  They make great covers for the few plants that don’t like mulch on their crowns.

The wheel barrel, grain shovel, & a couple of 5-gallon buckets are also my friends.  They’re tools that require using  different muscle groups so I got a little more work done before I petered out.

When it was completed, and all the tools cleaned & put away, I was happy knowing I had:

• spent some time in natural light
• burnt off a few calories
• protected the beds from summer drought

Isn’t the look of a tidy bed just so satisfying?

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© SVSeekins and Garden Variety Life, 2014