One more reason to stay off the internet

Mulched!

Surfing during my morning routine today and I came across a post on Facebook about recycling gardeners can do. I am not fanatic about recycling, but if I can do it without too much trouble I will. There was the usual information about composting and about using containers we usually throw away for growing-pots and I kind of skipped over those, most of which I had seen before.

Then something in the mulching section jumped off the page. The writer suggested pine cones would make good mulch. Whoa, I have a whole yard full of spruce cones to rake up and dump somewhere. What if?

I have been putting most of the plants outside during the day for the past week to harden them for full time life in the big dirt. When I walked out today with the first pot, I glanced around the yard and for the first time, all those dingy brown cones stood out from the background as if they were shiny gold.

A peck basket as I remember them.

I spent the next two hours on my hands and knees moving through the yard harvesting these little mulch nuggets. I collected about two pecks. When was the last time you heard that measure of volume? A peck is a unit of dry measure holding two gallons or eight quarts. It takes four pecks to make a bushel. My handy Apple conversion app doesn't even list pecks and bushels. But I remember those baskets well because that was the standard for our pay the summer I worked harvesting produce on a farm. If memory serves, and it often doesn't any more, we were paid something like 45 cents per peck picked. Peas, squash, potatoes, sometimes corn and sometimes apples.

Back to the present, those tiny spruce cones might as well have been gold nuggets the way they drew me to them. Finally with knees and back aching, I stood up and took my buckets of cones, only then realizing nothing was planted permanently yet so it was hardly worth spreading mulch.

Then I spotted the lonely little lilac where just the day before I had cleared all the weeds out around it, built up a little rock barrier and then spread some of that brand new topsoil – a good victim for experimentation. Mulching accomplished and I am looking forward to seeing that bush thrive. And, in this process I recalled a song from early in my youth. There are worse ways to start a day even if it is already two hours behind schedule. I am retired. What schedule?



If you're feeling nostalgic the way I did when I got carried away writing about bushels and pecks, here's the Doris Day song "A bushel and a peck and a hug around the neck."

I ran this post past my therapist which I do sometimes just to upset her day. Her response was, "You have a serious case of attention deficit disorder." I told her I know that already and asked her to tell me something I didn't know.

"You are a very strange man," she wrote.