Abraham Lincoln never had problems with plants. Compared to what it takes to properly mulch my garden, the Civil War was a minor scrap between two ill-tempered neighbors.

To mulch my garden, it takes an army of lawn care professionals, who dig rubber boots grimly into the dirt and whack at the savage undergrowth with scimitars.

Unfortunately, the only army that’s available at the low price of $0.00 an hour is an army of one, consisting of yours truly.

Every year, my mom looks at the flowerbeds in our front yard with a stern and critical eye. She then proceeds to label them a disgrace to the nation.

“I thought the begonias were rather pretty this year,” I ventured. I received a curt reply that assured me that we did not, in fact, have any begonias in our flowerbeds.

What we did have was an abundance of mulch. This is usually something that gardeners are happy about, except this mulch was the wrong color.

You can get mulch in a grand total of maybe three colors, and each of them is guaranteed to look more or less like… well, mulch.

But my mom declared that we had to do some intensive lawnwork. I declared I’d go back to my room.

My mom then proceeded, with the help of several sharp and painful-looking gardening implements, to explain to me how I would stay in the yard and help her garden.

Her explanation suddenly seemed perfectly reasonable. I acquiesced at once.

The task at hand was to swap out the red mulch in our yard for black mulch.

Normally I would say that after a few years, all mulch looks the same — like, oh, I dunno, mulch — but this year, I kept my mouth shut.

This was a good move, since Mom was digging into the old mulch with serious energy. I dodged splinters the size of knitting needles and the occasional gardening shovel.

Wherever Mom opened a gap in the old red mulch, I’d fill it in with black mulch. The tree in our front lawn started looking like it was growing out of a roulette wheel.

As if it couldn’t get any worse, each bag of mulch weighed about 5,247 pounds.

Okay, fine. Maybe they were only 4,247 pounds.

All right, all right. They were about 55 pounds.

Now, I like to think of myself as a fit person. I go to the gym a couple of times a week. Now and then, I even go for a run.

Even with all these fitness advantages, those bags of mulch were nearly impossible to carry.

I would have hired a donkey or a horse to help, only I remembered I’m worth $0.00.

At last we surrounded the tree in our front lawn with black mulch. I don’t think I’ve ever been happier, except for when I got a dog, had ice cream, finished a half-marathon, or, uh… yeah, that’s it.

On the whole, mulching the front yard wasn’t as terrible as I thought it would be.

But I shouldn’t have smiled that soon. Next week I have to mulch the backyard.

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Copyright 2025 Alexandra Paskhaver, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Alexandra Paskhaver is a software engineer and writer. Both jobs require knowing where to stick semicolons, but she’s never quite; figured; it; out. For more information, check out her website at https://apaskhaver.github.io.