Grass By Another Name

Friends of mine recently came into a large quantity of bark chips which they did not, as it happened, have any immediate use for.  They offered them to me.  I have a lot of square feet of yard that is criss-crossed by dirt paths covered with bark chips.  Well, they were covered with bark chips several years ago, but it turns out that the principles of composting apply equally to things that aren't even in compost piles, things like bark chips, say.  As a result, my many pathways have become pretty barren over the past three years during which their chipness has not been renewed.

And so, I gratefully accepted the offer of the bark chips.  The problem is...well, the problems are, because there are several problems.  First, I don't have a truck to load all these bark chips into; second, even if I were to borrow a truck, it would probably take me a week or so to load them into the truck, if it didn't take a month or so, given my relative lack of strength because of advanced age; third, I don't have forever to move the chips because they are taking up a lot of space in my friends' driveway.  Actually, they are taking up the entire driveway.

What to do?  I collected a dozen five gallon plastic buckets, a number which fit neatly into the back of my Subaru.  And I drove to my friends' house on the other side of the Point, filled all dozen buckets with chips using a gardening trowel, put them into the Subaru, drove back across the Point to my house, unloaded the buckets in pairs (about 10 pounds per bucket), and carried each pair of buckets to a path location.  There, I dumped them and then walked back to the Subaru to return the buckets for the next trip.  The entire process took about a half-hour, except that it took more like an hour and a half because, before I could dump the buckets on to the pathways, I had to crawl around on the ground and remove all the maple tree seedlings that have germinated this spring so that they don't keep on growing under the bark chips.  At the end of the entire process, I might or might not feel up to making another round trip.

Over about 18 days, I made one or two trips every day...say 25 trips.  That amounted to about 3,000 pounds of bark chips overall being transported and then carried some distance by my hand.  It was precious tiring work but now, at the end of it all, the pathways look truly gorgeous.  Very pleasing, but....

Several years ago, I persuaded Ed to stop mowing the grass on the grounds that everybody seemed to spend a lot of time encouraging their grass to grow so that they could spend a lot of time mowing their grass.  Somehow, building lots of cute little pathways covered with bark chips which then decompose (albeit without any effort on my part), resulting in my having to expend an awful lot of effort to restore the bark chips seems remarkably like the grass game in reverse and by another name.

I have noticed that the local cats and dogs when wandering through my extensive yard all choose to walk on the pathways.  So, too, the raccoons and the deer.  So kind of me to go through this effort for them.  I begin to think about whether there's any potential for a toll road to pay off the effort?