The Strulch arrived this afternoon, all fifty one hundred and fifty litre bags of it. They claim on their website that it is probably the best garden mulch ever made, and I think they are probably right. I first tried it after seeing a favourable mention in an article by Bunny Guinness, and have been raving about it ever since to anyone who will listen. Anyone who I think might benefit from garden mulch, that is.
Strulch consists of mineralised chopped straw. It is one hundred per cent weed free, prevents the vast majority of annual weeds from germinating, and somehow manages to slow down water loss from the soil through evaporation while not causing the crowns of plants to go mouldy or woody stems to rot. My pallet of fifty bags was the most expensive purchase I have made all year, and I look on it as a clear trade-off between cash outlay and my own time. A border that can be weeded and Strulched before it really starts into growth will require very little weeding for the rest of the growing season, apart from my ongoing war with the horsetail in the back garden, but that's another story, and by now it is not so much a war as armed neutrality.
The worst part of Strulch is getting it delivered. It came on the day the company said it would, after I'd chased them up to ask, and within the specified period of eight to five. Indeed, it considerately waited until five minutes after the film review programme had finished. It came on a small lorry as requested. Small, though, is a relative term. When we say that this is a small lorry, we do not mean the same as when we say this is a small ant. A 7.5 tonne lorry is still quite large, and this one drove the opposite side of the turning circle to the one I'd have liked it to take, and got itself wedged against the eleagnus hedge.
The carrier company had not given the driver any of my instructions on how to find us, where we would like the load dropped, or the advice to reverse in. A copy was taped to the load, but that wasn't a great deal of use. This keeps happening, and I have no idea why the UK's delivery companies and firms that despatch goods by mail order persist in their quaint belief in the ability of delivery drivers to read instructions that are stuck to a box in the back of the van, instead of a clipboard in the cab. Maybe they think they are psychic. Ours was the driver's second difficult delivery, the last one having involved tight access plus horse food, and he was not a happy man, though not blaming me in particular.
We ended up having to break the load on the lorry, which is what always seems to happen with Strulch in spite of my best efforts with instructions and cutting the hedge back, and the driver handed down every one of the fifty bags to me and the Systems Administrator, who rushed back and forth stacking them around the edge of the drive. I felt that was beyond his job description when he was supposed to be simply offloading a pallet, especially at twenty past four on a Friday afternoon when he still had further deliveries to make. I slipped him a fiver, and that and my profuse apologies that he was being put to all this trouble might have made his afternoon a little brighter, for he gave us a second pallet as well as ours. Clean new pallets, made out of fresh untreated softwood, burn beautifully in the log burner.
The driver managed to reverse out without too much difficulty, once he'd extracted himself from the hedge. The Systems Administrator's bad shoulder got wrenched in the rush, and the front garden looks as though we expecting flooding or to come under enemy fire, with a barricade of large white bags round the edge of the drive. I shall have to move them on to a stack on the concrete over the weekend, since they look ludicrous and more to the point would shade out and kill the ivy hedge if left where they are. Strulch is a marvellous product, but having it delivered is a complete pain.
Addendum Why do I keep buying it in such large loads, then? It is so much cheaper that way.
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