Summer is in full swing around here, which means just about every weekend we have some sort of family activity. Certainly not complaining. Given the choice between spending time with family or working on my house, I’ll choose hanging out with my family 100 times out of 100. Consequently, our DIY projects have been relegated to work days. Throw in some torrential rain and we haven’t done a whole lot around here lately. Meh. It is what it is.
In my never ending quest to have our home be as maintenance free as possible, I’ve had to make some changes to our mailbox flower bed. Keep in mind, these changes are still in progress. I didn’t feel like waiting until it was completely wrapped up.
The volume of rain we’ve gotten lately has been hugely helpful to our perpetually barren lawn, but has caused some problems with our mulched flower beds. The rain washes away sections of the mulch. Sends it right down the sidewalk It hasn’t happened in normal rainfall, just the heavy stuff.
It doesn’t look terrible with the missing mulch, but it’s noticeable since it exposes the weed barrier underneath. There’s a simple fix to keep mulch from washing away that will prevent or at least mitigate the mulch loss: add rocks.
Around some of the flower beds closer to the house, we incorporated river stones we bought from Lowes a couple years ago (the larger stones we got for free from a community project). We added those stones for exactly the same reason, rain washing the mulch away. So we know first hand how well the rocks protect the mulch.
I still need to buy a couple bags of rocks, but I had enough on hand to get started on the mailbox flower bed. I place the larger rocks down first and try to keep the spacing random. I don’t want the larger rocks to look patterned.
So for the price of a bag of rocks, you can keep your mulch from running away from you. You know what happens now, right? It’s not going to rain again this summer.
Keeping the mulch in place is the upside of the stones. The downside is it’s a little more annoying to keep the rock areas weed free. It’s not hard, it just takes a little longer and you may have to move the rocks out of the way to get at the weed roots. Trade offs. It’s always about trade offs. What would you rather do? Weed the rocks once a month or replace the mulch after every heavy summer rain?
In other news, I’m hoping to get our bug-free garage window solution knocked out this weekend. We’re doing one window first to validate the concept and then we’ll do the other two if we’re happy with it. Looking forward to showing you our idea.
Stay cool!
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