Adventures in Mulching!

So Monday morning dawns sunny and not too warm. Joe has the day off, and we figure we'll take advantage of the situation and get mulch down in the new (and some of the old) gardens. So off we head to Gerten's. We buy 2 yards of mulch, and the guy goes to load up the trailer. He put in 2 scoops and told us that was 1 yard. Sure looked like more to us, but he had to stop as the trailer wouldn't take much more! Fortunately, this isn't all that uncommon, so we could easily return for the rest of our purchase.

We turned down the alley, only to find a City of St. Paul truck headed out. We stopped, as did she, and she told us crews were close behind her, all set to chip seal (oil and then spread small rock) the alley. Now mind you, they never posted that this would be done, so we had no way of knowing this was coming. They post the streets, but not the alleys. Go figure.

Anyway, she thought they would arrive no later than noon. Current time: 10:30. What do we do? Park the trailer, race into the house and change (I will, under no non life threatening situation, leave the property in my yard working clothes) and race back out to start. Joe got the wheelbarrow down whilst I grabbed the ramps from the shed (generally used for the mower). We start shoveling mulch and Joe starts running. At first, he dumped it in the gardens, but they hadn't been weeded and there wasn't the right combination of room and time to do it all that way. So instead he dumped it behind the shed. I did get him to stop running - I was afraid he'd pass out! We quickly got down near the bottom of the load, and were just ready to lift the tarp out of the trailer and then move the trailer when another city truck came up - sure wasn't anywhere near noon! He was not pleased we were there in the alley, but we let him know we weren't pleased we'd had no notice! We disconnected the trailer, he and Joe put it in the garage, he swept up what we'd spilled (big surprise - that we'd spill some under those conditions) and Joe and I moved cars at precisely 11:03. Not bad, eh? He told us it would only take 15 minutes to do the alley. Maybe we'd have waited if we'd known that - I don't know. But in any case, we collapsed with cold drinks in our hands while they did the alley. After that, things proceeded at a normal pace as we weeded and moved mulch where it needed to go. So now that's done. Good thing we didn't get the 2 yards all at once - we had more than enough with the 1! I'm quite convinced they gave us closer to 2. I don't think we were that far off in our calculations. Looking at the size of the trailer, and knowing the size of a cubic yard, we had more than 1 in there. Oh, well, I won't complain. We spend enough there that they can be a bit generous in their bobcat loads. We just went back (after some major showers) and got a refund on the rest!