A Day's Work

We have a corner of the yard that never grew grass well, so years ago we decided to put in a container garden with a fountain.  It takes maintenance over time and some years I've been better at keeping it up and other years, not so much.  I always put plants there, mind you, but I don't always work on the upkeep.  We originally laid down so-called weed cloth which has bio-degraded itself into scraps.  The grass has merrily grown on top of it, which at least makes it easy to pull, but is frustrating.  We had laid down a good bed of wood chips originally - not the bark kind from the store, but some from a tree lot where people take the trees they cut down and the city chips them into mulch.  And it's free!  This was very important when we set this up.  Not the prettiest of mulch, but free is good!  Over time, this kind of mulch turns into soil, hence the grass.  My dad one year, being very helpful, got rid of the ugly stuff in our corner garden, which was the remains of our wood chips.  This left pretty much just the scrappy weed cloth.  Now what?  So, we invested in store-bought bark mulch, much better looking than our wood chips and not overly expensive, no bigger than the area is.
I've been planning on working on that garden and had gotten all the needed materials: bags of mulch and a new fountain pump, but hadn't gotten around to actually doing it.  The weatherman was making dire forecasts of "These are the last cool mornings we are going to have for a while" and "Chance of severe storms" (Ha), so I decided I'd better get busy.  My little project ended up lasting all day......and the plants were already potted (the work of other days).  It takes an amazing amount of time to unload a fountain of all its goodies and clean it out and change out the pump and put it back together (making sure it works before you load it back up!).  I had to wash off all the rocks because they were covered in mulch silt and we have a LOT of rocks on that tiny little fountain.

Then came the laying of the new bark mulch, which involved moving all the plants previously potted and placed, removing mulch silt where necessary and then decoratively distributing said bark mulch.  I added some stepping stones to hopefully keep mulch from being redistributed to the yard and re-placed all the potted plants and rocks and other things I have except for the garden critters (decorative animals and such I've collected over time) because I pooped out.  Still, it was a good day's work.