The stenches of spring

[Jackmannii]

It’s mulch season! Hooray!!!

Yes, it is springtime, and an Ohioan’s fancy turns to spreading mulch - tons of it - over anything that passes for bare ground. Everyone’s doing it, everyone’s selling it - even Irina, the little Ukrainian woman who sold me a tree at the garden center on Sunday couldn’t pass up the opportunity. “You vant mulch?”

Truckloads of men, all wearing their green cards around their necks* have been busy spreading barrels of mulch all around my workplace the past couple of days. Which is fine, except the stuff reeks. I mean, we’re talking heavy-duty stench here. It’s as if, in addition to the yard waste and forest scrapings that goes into mulch, they also composted a number of small furry mammals and maybe a yard worker or two. The odor is so heavy that it seeps indoors. Based on past experience it’ll be at least a couple of weeks before the stink subsides.

The other reek this spring is issuing from the Scotts Company, lawn care and garden chemical giant based in Ohio. They (with the help of the idjits at my local paper) are madly pushing Lawn Awareness as part of going green for the planet. I kid you not.

*"“A well-fed lawn withstands heat better and uses water more efficiently,” (a Scotts spokesman) said…Feed regularly. • Sweep fertilizer from sidewalks onto the grass (says the Scotts “vice president of sustainability”).

“Keeping fertilizer on the lawn protects streams and rivers instead of allowing the fertilizer to drain directly into (them),” Martinez said.

“This is one of those really small things that can make a really big difference. Everybody can have a positive impact on what’s going on, and it’s not always something complicated.”*

Yeah, betcha didn’t know that pumping a bunch of fertilizer onto your lawn regularly results in saving water and the planet. This may seem counter-intuitive, seeing that all this feeding makes the lawn grow faster, sucking up more water and requiring more frequent mowing with $3.50-a-gallon gas as those noisy, inefficient gas engines spew exhaust into the springtime air. And it would seem that merely sweeping excess fertilizer from the sidewalk onto the grass wouldn’t prevent it from draining into the sewer after a heavy rain, but I suppose every little bit helps save the planet, unless you don’t dump it on the lawn in the first place.

I am not antilawn, but having a division of Sustainability at Scotts Co. is somewhere between incongruous and laughable.
*not really.

[LurkMeister]

Ah, yes, spring, when I have to start checking before I open my windows to ventilate the ground-floor condo I’m renting to make sure that the landscaping company hasn’t chosen today to mulch/fertilize. One day I stepped out to check the mail and almost passed out from the stench.

[lieu]

There was something in the paper the other day about how farmers across the European continent are putting manure on their fields and, given the easterly breezes, London and much of G.B. are innundated with “le stench.” British dopers, have you found this to be true?

Jackmannii, our neighbor uses chicken crap as a fertilizer. The whiffs are lovely, just freakin’ lovely.

[Mangetout]

@lieu

There was something in the paper the other day about how farmers across the European continent are putting manure on their fields and, given the easterly breezes, London and much of G.B. are innundated with “le stench.” British dopers, have you found this to be true?

It seems unlikely, but there’s no way to tell - I often smell farmyard stinks, but it’s probably from a field close by, or the bathroom.

[Harmonious_Discord]

Let me tell you that when you have to plant next to hundreds of daffodils in flower that it is overwhelming. They don’t have a smell that is pleasant like a rose or nasty, but with your face about 2 feet from the masses of blooms it does get hard to breath.

[Jackmannii]

Thing is, mulch and compost really shouldn’t have a nasty odor. I suspect what happens is that the commercially used stuff comes out of huge heaps, the interior of which are deprived of oxygen and so you get anaerobic breakdown, which tends to reek.

I did hear of a case awhile back where someone found a human finger in their bag of mulch. It was never claimed. It’s reminiscent of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, where workers supposedly fell into vats at the stockyards and went out into the world as Durham’s Pure Leaf Lard.

[Duck_Duck_Goose]

@Mangetout

It seems unlikely, but there’s no way to tell - I often smell farmyard stinks, but it’s probably from a field close by, or the bathroom.

“Strong winds cause stinky whiff.”

*What’s that stink? A terrible smell is hanging over parts of England and Wales and it’s not your dad’s socks.

Loads of people have reported a manure-like whiff in London, Kent, Hertfordshire, Berkshire, East Anglia and as far west as Devon.

Weather experts say the nasty aroma is down to strong winds carrying smell caused by farming and pollution in Northern Europe. *

[Harmonious_Discord]

@Jackmannii

Thing is, mulch and compost really shouldn’t have a nasty odor. I suspect what happens is that the commercially used stuff comes out of huge heaps, the interior of which are deprived of oxygen and so you get anaerobic breakdown, which tends to reek.

I did hear of a case awhile back where someone found a human finger in their bag of mulch. It was never claimed. It’s reminiscent of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, where workers supposedly fell into vats at the stockyards and went out into the world as Durham’s Pure Leaf Lard.

I suspect it may have mold growing in it too, which is bad. I can smell it strongly in the free city wood mulch.

[gotpasswords]

@lieu

Jackmannii, our neighbor uses chicken crap as a fertilizer. The whiffs are lovely, just freakin’ lovely.

Same here - used to have a neighbor who would spread chicken poop all over the place, stinking up the neighborhood for at least a week.

Another spring stink - Geraniums! Gads, I hate them.

[auRa]

This past winter has been absolute crap in Finland: not so cold, very wet, hardly any snow. However, there is one good thing that comes out of it. Usually, the coming of spring in Helsinki is heralded by the inimitable aroma of several thousands of deep-frozen dog turds all thawing at the same time (because while we’re supposed to pick up after our pets, not everyone has grasped the necessity of this task…probably because they don’t live next to the grassy areas they take their dogs to shit in…). This winter, however, has been so warm that the droppings have decomposed more, and the smell is almost completely nonexistent now. This makes me a very happy camper.

[3acresandatruck]

Just came in from playing in the garden, where I was enjoying the heady aroma of horse manure wafting over from the neighbor’s pasture. Now, it isn’t like you don’t smell equine dung during the winter, but we had a nice vigorous thunderstorm this morning which did a fine job of pulverizing and semi-liquifying the turd mounds arrayed in their plenty and splendor by three fine creatures, including a rather large Percheron. Then the sun came out and the ambient humidity rose and Nature cooked up a couple of acres of her finest horse dung stew…you could see the haze created by the rising manure steam. The breeze came and I inhaled and thought, “Ah, Spring! even the shit smells special…”