A huge benefit to me is that the City of Seguin offers free woodchip mulch for its residents. I have made much use of that in building pathways and tree circles at no cost besides the effort of hauling it home. Early in my time here I bought four sturdy reusable bags for this transport. Their capacity is 72 gallons each, but I quickly realized that if I completely filled one of these bags with that much woodchip, I couldn’t lift it!
In my almost three years here, I have come to learn the optimum amount to put in each bag in order to be able to wrangle it in and out of the car safely. I avoid doing a mulch run when the city pile is wet, because of course the mulch weighs more then.
On my latest mulch project, I was curious as to what is the weight of a load of mulch for me (taking advantage of my prior CrossFit training to lift it properly!). It turns out that the sum weight of the four bags shown above is 193 pounds.
Normally I save mulching jobs for the winter when it is cooler (daytime highs here are still in the 90s F). However, I wanted to expand and modify some of my pathways before I start adding new plants in the fall. So here’s how I used this load of mulch (each pair of photos is before and after).
(1) When the pond was installed, the mound that houses the waterfall covered part of the main central pathway that goes from front to back of the garden. Compounding that obstruction was a volunteer Zizotes Milkweed plant that chose to grow right at the narrowest point of the pathway, and that I wanted to keep (establishing native milkweeds is proving difficult, and volunteers are currently welcome). So I widened the pathway.
(2) The Texas Mountain Laurel tree has grown significantly in width since I last defined its mulch border. So when I walk round it — which I need to do often to check for Genista Broom Moth caterpillars — I have been walking on bare earth (where annual plants grew earlier this year). I widened the mulched area around this tree.
(3) The Desert Willow has also grown a lot and it is so wide now that it is most easily accessed from the grass pathway behind it. (To use my original pathway I have to step over Rock Rose and Standing Cypress that have also grown well.) So I created a new pathway to get to the Desert Willow tree and widened its mulch area a little.
(4) Since the pond was installed, there hasn’t been an obvious way to access the back side. Eventually I cut down some sunflowers to make a way. I’ve now mulched that to make it a defined pathway, and this clearing also has the advantage of providing line of sight from the patio to the succulent area at the back of the garden.
(5) Any remaining mulch was used to cover the soil around some of the newer or smaller perennial plants. Mulch helps to shade soil and retain moisture.
That should be enough mulch for now. Sometime over the winter there will be a major project to bring in enough to add an inch or two to all of the pathways, and a thinner layer in some of the plant beds. Over time the wood breaks down, which is exactly what I want to happen so that the soil progressively gets fed with more organic matter.
Rewilding My Lot 
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