So, we are going to try the do-it-yourself mulching.
The first thing I did was a quick check on the mower/mulcher to make sure everything was in good shape. I checked the oil and made sure nothing was blocking the blades. I put in some gas and fired it up. While I did laugh at the irony of using the gas, I went with the lesser of evils concept and moved along. The equipment was in fine order… on to mulching.
Gloves… check… safety goggles…… check. Fortunately, we had those so no expense.
I trimmed the trees and created a stack or the branches. Some of the branches are pretty big, so we divided the debris. We took very thick branches and trimmed all of the small branches off. We set those aside for another day. Now we were ready to mulch!
I manned the mower/mulcher and my wife “fed the beast”. We used the bag attachment so the mulch would not fly everywhere and would be easier to manage. I fired up the beast and away we went. Guess what… it worked!
My wife would toss out a few branches at a time and I would run them over with the mower/mulcher. A few loud bangs here and there, but the beast chopped everything real well. It seemed like in just a few minutes that we filled up the bagger. No worries, we emptied it and continued on. Four mulcher bags filled a big garbage bag. By the time we were done we had filled a half a dozen bags with mulch. We just kept at it until we were done.
You would have thought we had solved the energy crisis on our own. We laughed like school kids. It took a couple of hours (as I said, we have a lot of trees) and we were pretty pooped, but it wasn’t that bad. We gave ourselves cool points for trying it and making it work. We had our own home made mulch.