It's Mulch Season (aka death season)

Over the weekend, we started chrysanthemums, shasta daisies, marigolds, and nasturtiums indoors. They bask in the window-well of the spare bedroom. We'll see how they fare. It would be nice to have marigolds again! I miss my potted marigolds, the Baudelaires, who lived in that same window-well and grew to enormous heights.

We've also finished laying down compost, bone meal, and alfalfa. The last batch of compost contained manure, which I've not worked with before. I have still not worked with it, because it turns out that the smell of that particular manure triggers my heroic gag reflex. So there was that.

The daffodils are starting to bud, probably encouraged by the short burst of warmth we had.

Now we've moved on to mulching, and if you have never laid down dozens of bags of mulch... well, I don't rightly know how to explain it. There's something personally vexing about the mulch, and your relationship to it inevitable becomes adversarial. The mulch dislikes you. The mulch dislikes you for your temerity. The mulch will puff dirt into your eyes as you heft a bag, and it will deposit splinters inside your gloves, and no matter how many bags you haul the remainder will taunt you in silent rows. Spreading it turns into a hilariously awkward and uncomfortable exercise; it gets everywhere except the places you want it to be.

I like how mulch looks, and I like what it does.

I do not like the mulch itself.

Still, we're down to a few bags now. Even mulch can't last forever.