Gettin' back to Gettin' - February 18 and 19, 2012

So I’ve decided to try to get this darn garden under control again.  Alas, as much as I want to do this completely organically, I have to concede when it comes to the damn Bermuda grass.  That stuff is awful.  Pretty much any green you see in the pictures below is this abominable weed.  I confess that I have had to break out the “Ortho” and “Round Up” products.

So what all did I do two weekends ago??  Let’s see if I can remember…

I broke out the weed eaters and started hacking away the Bermuda grass.  Of COURSE the electric one, for which about 25 lbs of electrical cord must be dragged around and tripped over and cursed at doesn’t always feed the line well.  And the battery powered one feeds line great, but only holds about 10 minutes of charge at best. So it was a hassle.

I managed to hack out the Bermuda grass that was alongside the driveway and covering the path inside the fence that’s closest to the driveway. Throughout this blog I’ve referred to this as the “driveway path”, so I’ll continue doing so…

After it was all hacked down, I raked it up and bagged it.  Just getting that one little area “under control” was SO encouraging.

Driveway Path Before and After

Driveway Path Before and After, from inside the fence

That little bit of green that you can still see, sort of in the center bottom of the “after” picture above is a “volunteer” dill!  I worked so hard not to crush it.  There were two sprigs like this, but I accidentally crushed the other one after oh so carefully working around it for hours.  Made it smell like pickles…

After I cut down, raked up and bagged as much of that awful weed as I could, I started spraying everything left with some awful toxin.  It was supposed to start killing off the remaining grass within 24 hours.  Here are some more “before shots” of the nastiness…

Front Garden "Before" Pics

On Sunday, I cut back the bushes on the side of the house back and then bagged all the bits.  The one good thing about the neighbor’s privacy fence is that we no longer need the bushes to give privacy to that side of the house.  We can thin them out somewhat and let more sunlight filter into the living room, and give the doggies more opportunities for sun bathing!  Yay, sunbathing!!

I also reasoned that, the “strategy” that I used to accidentally kill off the grass in the backyard might work to help control the Bermuda grass in the front yard, so I cut the grass in the “sidewalk bed” as short as I could.  I set the mower on the lowest setting and it kept bottoming out, so I raised it to the second lowest setting and let ‘er rip!  I mowed around the 5 rose bushes and the 3 (or 7) rock roses that keep on tickin’, making a mental note to get after those the next weekend (which, now, was last weekend).  More edging and raking and bagging and here are some pics…

A few more finishing details...

At the end of the weekend, my body was pretty sure I had done some hard work, and now that I’m writing it up, I sure do enjoy seeing the progress, but as always, when I list it, it just doesn’t SEEM to be so much work.  But it was, really it WAS!!