If you didn’t catch it from this post’s title, summer has arrived early in North Carolina, with 90+ degree and 60%+ humidity days, driving the apparent temperature outside to well over 100 degrees. Just stepping outside your door brings on a full-fledged sweat, and if you even think about doing any yardwork or physical activity during the day, it better be in the early-morning or late-evening hours, or you’re risking heat exhaustion or heatstroke.
So, of course, I stupidly spent most of Friday morning hauling mulch from the landscaper’s back to my house, and most of Friday afternoon transporting it from a pile beside my house into the playset in the backyard.
It was only 4.5 cubic yards of mulch, total, which compared to the 8 yards from a couple years back, didn’t make quite the same size pile as before, but since this time I transported it all by myself instead of paying for a $75 delivery fee, felt like about twice as much as I really wanted to handle.
4.5 cu. yds of cypress chips still makes a sizeable pile!
One “benefit” to the new mulch, (when compared to the shredded palettes that made up the last playground mulch I bought), is that it was significantly less dense per unit volume. Although this meant I needed to get a little more than I wanted to get the same coverage, it made shoveling and hauling around in a wheelbarrow much easier than the last time I did this. My nephew wanted to earn some money, so he took his turns with the mulching fork loading the wheelbarrow, which I then pushed into the play area and dumped/raked. With copious amounts of water breaks and a couple of trips in to the air-conditioning to REALLY cool off, we finished up the mulch transport in about 4 hours or so.
Rejuvenated play area, just in time for the heat of summer.
We barely beat out an afternoon thunderstorm, which immediately flooded the storm drains and catchbasins around the play area, but the mulch bed itself weathered the storm nicely, and may have even leveled itself out a little bit more because of the torrential downpours.
So of course, by doing all this prep work to get the play area spruced up again, I’ve guaranteed that the thermometer this week isn’t going to drop below 95 degrees. But at least it’s nice to look at, while tucked away safely indoors behind double-paned windows and basking in the cool breath of central air conditioning!
