In past years, my go-to mulches for vegetable and ornamental gardens have been fine-textured pine bark (“mini-pine fines”) or sometimes cypress mulch. They are valuable for keeping soil temperatures down in summer, preserving moisture and suppressing weeds. As the mulch breaks down (over a season or two) it can be incorporated into the soil, improving tilth.
Now I’m finding it difficult to locate these mulches. The market is currently saturated with colored mulches (usually red, or black, which is an inane choice because it retains more heat). The packages don’t list which dyes are used so I have no idea what they are and what their safety profile is (most such dyes, with the possible exception of the cheapest colored mulch are iron oxide or carbon-based and are considered safe to handle).
Now I find out that in addition to possibly questionable dyes, this colored mulch typically comes from recycled wood - i.e. old pallets, decks, construction and demolition waste etc. It’s colored partly because it looks crummy without dyes. Worse, such wood has been found to commonly be contaminated with wood preservative like chromated copper arsenates or in the case of pallets, whatever substances were stored atop them. Using such mulch can be harmful to soil organisms, pets and people.
Nice.
Earlier this spring the only alternatives I could find were giant-sized pine bark chunks, which are inconvenient to use and break down very slowly, or massively overpriced cypress mulch at $11 a bag. Thankfully, I just found a source of cypress mulch at $2.49 a bag which I will be dutifully spreading this weekend before the next heat wave.
Do not stand between a man and his preferred mulch.
Anti-rant, someone in the office mentioned they had a bike sitting unused in a shed that they were just waiting to get rid of. That bike is now mine. And just before I was about to go to Walmart and make the buy. I’m back on two wheels!
I don’t know how I would feel about it as a standalone site or app, but I’ve used Zelle through my bank’s app and website with no problems. My mom loves using it to pay bills that used to require a paper check (mostly small businesses, like the lawn care service).
Notice to the ice cream truck with the intensely annoying and very LOUD jingle: if you come anywhere near me one more time I’m going out there with a fucking sledgehammer.
ok, im usually a left-leaning type since I live in ca but my tree-hugging compadres are financially killing us …
Ok while back someone passed a law( by public "proposition "I think) that said Waste management (aka the trash hauling and disposal monopoly)had to cut what they put in landfills by 30 percent
Well they came up with a way to recycle used paper-based food containers (ie delivery pizza boxes Asian take-out containers etc) which means there will be a 3rd recycling can to be added to the mix in the next month or two
Now all of a sudden we get a notice from WM and the city that our trash will be going up 3 percent … in a miraculous coincidence about the same time upping my trash bill to about 110 a quarter… I say bleh and a pox on the voters at the moment
We’ve had three bins for years - trash, recycling, and yard waste. It’s been more than a year since they told us we could put pizza boxes in the yard waste bin.
Where I live we’ve had three bins for a long time, but not sorted in quite the same way. One is for general organic kitchen goop and certain yard waste that are used for composting, another is for recycling and consists of metals, plastics, glass, paper, and cardboard, and the third is non-recyclable general garbage that goes into landfill. I guess the idea is the same – minimize the amount of landfill material.
Where I live, we have our trash hauled by WM (they seem to have a major monopoly on the business), but it’s “single stream” recycling – we only have two containers: Recyclable stuff (all of it gets thrown together) and everything else.
Sorting out the recycled stuff must be difficult. There’s a certain amount of automation, but how much has to be done by hand?
Cecil once wrote an article about it. IIRC, it was in his long-defunct Paulina Street Journal column, which I think has long-since been scrubbed from the Web. He describes workers manually sorting through the trash – In Cecil’s own words, “A job every bit as disgusting as it sounds”.
(Does anyone know of the Paulina Street Journal articles are still around somewhere? I’ve been trying to find the movie review he wrote there for Inception.)
Our stove has fizzled out. At least, the oven has stopped working. We’d look into getting the oven fixed, but in addition two of the burners had stopped working as well. Fixing everything would probably cost close to getting a new one, as well as being a big pain in the ass.
So we’ve sprung for a new one. It was not an expense we needed at this time, dammit. We had just inked a contract to do a landscaping job in the front yard as part of preparing our home for sale next year.
Well, at least Lowe’s was having a sale on the particular type of stove we had in mind.
Try finding any kitchen appliances, let alone non-standard sizes, in white. GRRR…
Wife wants a new fridge (current white one working fine, why do you ask?), but in that size they only seem to make stainless steel, which would certainly stand out in a small kitchen with all white appliances and countertops…
so just because you talked about wood mulch… I have read that wood mulch attracts termites and other icky things like mice. Have you had any issues?
I am trying to reclaim some flower beds around my house and it was suggested to put down a weed screen and then cover with mulch to try to keep the regrowth to a minimum. I had read that it can cause termite infestations and also that mice like to nest.
I haven’t seen this to be a problem. Various sources disagree on the matter, but there seems to be something of a consensus that you don’t want to pile mulch right up against the foundation of the house.
Memphis is experiencing the record heat that is plaguing parts of the country. It looks like this will go on for the rest of the month. So the utility company put out a message asking people to keep their thermostats at 78 degrees during the day to help relieve strain on the infrastructure. I read some of the comments. Yeah, yeah, I know. They were basically versions of two things: “This is America! No one can tell me to be considerate of my community” and “What’s going to happen when we all have to drive electric cars? Huh? Huh? Did you think of that?”. My favorite was “They are going to send me a huge bill anyway so I’m lowering my thermostat to 65”. Some days I really hate humanity.
When we remodeled our kitchen a few years ago, the only way to get refrigerator, stove, dishwasher all matching was to go with stainless steel. In our free time we wipe fingerprints off.
I’m done with NBC news. I’ve been a steady viewer for a lot of years, but have been really annoyed with the steady decline in quality recently. The last straw has been the incessant coverage of Johnny Depp and his female counterpart over a three week period. This is not news; it’s tabloid bullshit. And when you elect to cover an interview with whatever her name is and the equally vapid Savannah Guthrie instead of reporting on the January 6th hearing that same day, we’re done. It’s PBS News Hour from here on out. Fuck off, Lester.
Wow. Last night a very good friend of mine beat the fuck out of his friend/neighbor/landlord. He is the most non-aggressive guy I know. He has been battling mesial temporal sclerosis, which causes him to have seizures every day. He has had surgery on the temporal lobe of his brain, which did not help his problem.
From what I’ve heard, he just walked next door, walked into his neighbors home, dragged the guy outside, and beat him with a brick. I know the neighbor and he is a cool guy. This is so freaking strange.
