A rite of spring in this gardened, landscaped, greenspaced city on a hill is the annual Application of the Mulch. This Festival begins mid to late March and continues through much of April. Walking to work from the bus stop the other morning, I saw an Application of the Mulch Party.
An eight foot mound of decomposing wood chips, steam rising from it in thin, misty clouds, stood nobly under the trees on a cool, clear March morning. The mulch was to be applied in a sculpture garden at 19th and Constitution. Walking closer, I saw a dump truck full of the mother lode with even more steam pouring, a heated thing in a cold place. Smaller piles of the wonderful stuff, staged among the trees and sculptures where it would soon be spread, each gave off little clouds of their own.
Spread the wealth around
Hot mulch contains a ferment of life. In the pile on each separate chip of wood, a million microbes live, cities full of frenzied activity, the residents eating, processing, excreting, munching and composting the dead wood-chips, a galaxy of life breaking them back down into soil, into the earth. Life is built on this good sort of decay, this life to death to life again scenario. The moldering chips, ultimately, will feed the soil and therefore, the plants, the trees, and the grass that grows there.
An Application of the Mulch party smells at once good and bad, sweet and putrid, a faint excrementish whiff, that sweet-rotten smell we complained about to our parents when, on our way to childhood vacations, we drove through rural America.
Another thing: life generates heat. Living things are excited and exciting, vibrant and moving. This Mulch Party was nothing if not steamy. No wallflowers here, no holding back: all participants (with the possible exception of the spreaders doing their duty), were all in. Truly a hot time in the old town that morning.
I’ve marveled and puzzled that life, in a sense, is based on death, the decay of other vegetative material, wood chips, food waste, dry leaves, animal wastes, and more. I love mulching season because it reminds me with every fermenting pile of wood chips, each heap of chopped, composted leaves, that life always wins. In this case the victory is long term. This life forms part of a grand cycle, a dance in which wood chips break down, gradually into soil that nourishes plants which, in turn, provides oxygen and food for animals and people, and ultimately, more chips and leaves for another Application of the Mulch season, and the process starts all over again.
