A September Gardening Tale

Every year in August, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts sets aside one weekend when the state’s 6.25% sales tax is waived on purchases under $2,000.  The tax holiday was originally intended to help strapped parents lessen the cost of school materials for their children, and college students stock up on critical dorm items such a newer model expresso machine.

 Like all good ideas, though, the tax holiday quickly spiraled out of control and became the once-a-year opportunity to reduce the final price of 84-inch hi-def televisions, iPhone 11s, and Peloton exercise systems. Back-to-school backpacks have long receded in the rear-view mirror.

Pop quiz: On August 29, 2020, which of these items did Betty and Neal buy (hint: the title of this blog contains the consecutive letters g-a-r-d-e-n)?

a)     A CyberPowerPC gaming system to save $106.25 in sales tax

b)     A Fuji Sportif racing bike to save $61.69 in sales tax

c)     A Kitchen-Aid convection microwave to save $48.43 in sales tax

d)     Seven cubic yards of dark brown mulch to save $14.37 in sales tax

* * * * *

The mulch was delivered by Sam White & Sons on September 1, and piled neatly on the parking pad in front of our home.  We, of course, were on our way to the beach.

I should add a note about Mr. White’s business.  If the Harvard Business School was truly on the ball, they would send out a crack team of grad students to write a case study on Sam White & Sons, and then devote a full semester each year to learning the genius of his business model.  When you walk into the Sam White’s office, you see two credit card readers.  As we paid for our mulch, I started to insert my credit card in the one on the left.  “Use the other one,” I was instructed.  “What’s this one for?” I asked.  “That’s for incoming stuff,” was the reply.

Apple Computer has a trillion-dollar market valuation.  In its most recent quarter, it’s ‘cost of goods sold’ was about 62 cents for every dollar of revenue, meaning its ‘gross profit margin’ was about 38 cents per dollar of sales.  Sam White & Sons has no ‘cost of goods sold’.  In fact, it charges you to drop off the same stuff they will sell to me.  All they do is grind it up, sort it by size and color, and put a price on it.  If the company went public, I figure Sam White’s market valuation would be a couple of billion, easily.  Enough on the subject.

Our first act as gardeners
was to top our loam with mulch

The front of our property (the back is wetlands) is roughly half an acre and there is nary a blade of grass to be seen. It’s all plants: trees, shrubs, perennials, and annuals (well, there’s also a house and a driveway, so let’s call it 20,000 square feet of garden).  After five years, those plants – and especially the shrubs and perennials – have made it a fairly dense proposition.  Back in 2015, our first act as gardeners was to put down four or five inches of mulch atop 965 cubic yards of loam before we planted anything on the property. 

Five years later, our garden is quite dense

Mulch, however, breaks down over time into, well, soil.  By this summer, the remaining mulch was thin enough weeds grew through it.  We needed to do something.  The logical thing would be to call a garden service and tell them to come mulch our garden for us.

But there was much more to the project than just throwing down mulch.  Volunteer plants – and especially wandering perennials – had insinuated themselves into areas of the garden they didn’t belong.  Tiny but insistent weeds needed to be dug out; throwing mulch on them would only retard their inevitable appearance.  Shrubs needed to be thinned.  In short, this was the kind of eagle-eyed and meticulous work that could not be entrusted to an outsider. We had to do this project ourselves.

The mulch pile, roughly half gone

We started every morning at 6:30 and worked until the sun made gardening uncomfortable – always before noon.  And, we made good progress.  The pile dwindled each day.

But it was still there: out where everyone driving by could see it.  When a week passed and three cubic yards remained, we began pushing ourselves to finish what we had started.  Last Thursday we made a final, gallant effort to finish the job, and succeeded in at least making it look to nosy neighbors like we were done: all the mulch was now in the back of the garden and the parking pad was mulch-free.

We took care of lots of
garden maintenance

And, sometimes when you’re at the end of a job, you press too hard.  That’s what we both did.  On that last morning, Betty later acknowledged her back been bothering her (she has the eye and the horticultural knowledge to know what ought to be removed; my skills are weeding and making pretty edges with the mulch).  By mid-afternoon, Betty’s back was telling her she had abused it once too often.  By Friday morning, the act of getting out of bed was excruciating.

Five days and two trips to urgent care later, her back is feeling better.  The garden looks magnificent; not just because of the mulch, but because of the culling of surplus plants and the removal of six, 50-gallon bags of garden detritus.

There's no question about its beauty...

There is a lesson here, but I’m uncertain what it is.  On the one hand, Betty and I ought to have done the obvious thing and hired one of the six ‘garden maintenance’ firms in Medfield to do the spreading for us.  But had we done so we would have hovered over whomever we had hired at $15 an hour to ensure they were doing the job properly.  And, we would have inevitably become frustrated because hired hands never spy everything the gardener sees.  We would have been in the garden exactly as long as if we had done it ourselves and have paid other people handsomely in the process; but at least we wouldn’t have back spasms.

...and we're good on maintenance until spring

On the other hand, at 70 and 71, we’re getting to the age where both bicep-building and stoop gardening induces back pains.  Fortunately, Betty designed our garden to be ‘low maintenance’. Unfortunately, ‘low maintenance’ is still ‘some maintenance required’.  September’s mad dash to get a job done will carry us through to next spring.  By then, however, hundreds of birds will have deposited alien seeds (complete with fertilizer packets), around the garden. The wind will have brought in still more interlopers, and rhizomes will be rhizomes.  In short, the whole rodeo starts again in March.

Fortunately, nothing will be piled in our parking pad.