Weed, the Legal Stuff

Oh I remember the good old days of gardens filled with unwanted liriope. Those heady days when I thought that removing that scourge from my garden would be the end of my worries.

Well the liriope plugs that we pull each year have diminished to a small handful. Meanwhile, new assaults are being waged by various invasive and unwanted species.

There is literally no space in our garden. It is filled up with weeds. All that greenery between the iris fronds and the grass line? Weeds. (Don't mind the straw - it was an attempt to get grass to grow in a different area and some of it blew into the garden.) It's so pervasive it's quite hard to uproot because the process seems to involves digging up and upturning almost all the soil without accidentally uprooting desirable plants just below the surface.

 The most noticeable int he above picture appears to be what is called wild violet:

It is choking our flowers and hostas and is all over our front and back lawn as well. In the grass, it might be a lost cause unless we opt to use a herbicide. We tend to avoid doing that kind of thing on the grass, where the kids are playing. Honestly if it's green and sending down roots to help with soil erosion, we usually just live with it and mow it when it gets to high. In the garden though, it seems to be taking over.

Next up is this one, mostly gathered around the trunk of the cherry tree, may possibly be called Henbit:

Finally, we have a lot of butter cup (I didn't take a picture of that). All of these weeds seem to be mostly newcomers this year. We've had violet in the yard before but now it has really made a home in our garden bed. We also have plants that we deliberately introduced to the garden that have taken over. Our strawberries have grown wild and sent runners everywhere. I don't target them for uprooting, but I'm not careful with them either. Otherwise the irises and black-eyed Susans seem to have taken over - but they are welcome.

With effort, I weeded a small plot of garden. It looks so naked now without the weeds there. Hopefully now that they aren't so crowded, the other plants can start to thrive.

Some mulch made the whole thing look much nicer, and might help dissuade weeds from taking roots.

 There's a pretty ugly and obvious line where I stopped. I have quite a lot more work ahead of me...

That Spring Post

We've been doing this long enough that every loyal reader probably knows what's coming - that post where I go on and on about what we've been doing outdoors to improve our yard and garden. It's that time of year. As spring arrives, so do our big plans and dreams to give our house great curb appeal or create a backyard that's inviting and fun (and then the sun gets hot and the bugs come out and I retreat inside and never get to enjoy it). We've been doing so many of these that I won't even link back to them all. Peruse March, April, and May for every year we've been doing this, and you'll find them.

And so, it begins. First, as a reminder of how much we've done in just a couple of week, this was the first day of spring:

 The blooming trees were quite surprised:

But two weeks later when the weather finally warmed up to about 45 during the day, we got to work. We went to Home Depot to stock up on mulch and, as always happens, came home with a few extra items. Some lavender and rosemary, a tomato plant (we've been starting basil from seeds in our window but weren't planning to do vegetables until we remembered that basil and tomatoes love to grow together)

We also bought some full sun colorful flowers to add to the front garden that we were planning to redo. We got Lithadora and Salvia, which were both very on sale and therefore very tempting:

However, that meant the clock was ticking to rearrange the garden and get these guys in the ground. Our front largest garden bed had been designed so that we surrounded our big oak with flowering ground cover. So it never looked good after we had to remove the giant oak tree. For the first year (when we were told we should not plant anything permanent there to allow the pest that killed our tree to subside), we planted a depressingly small amount of annuals that didn't last the summer. Then last fall when we tried to plant our crepe myrtle there, we found out that the hollowed-out stump area was still too woody to give us the room to plant a tree, forming a solid floor of trunk about a foot below the surface.

Then D had a genius idea last week, after I complained about it for the umpteenth time and debated whether we should pay someone to dig/carve it out. He moved it a couple of feet closer to our lamppost and moved a hydrangea that was crowded in a different garden bed into the shallower hole where the old tree had been. This let us move the crepe myrtle away from being directly under power lines AND allowed us to shrink the garden bed more in line with the more modest plants we have there now that the oak tree is gone.

We planted the Salvia and Lithadora all around the hydrangea and crepe myrtle. It was a family affair.

 Then D uprooted the plastic garden divider and moved it to make the garden smaller.

You can see better in this picture the old bed area and the new one. Obviously we need to turn the soil on the area that used to be garden, uproot any Georgia Blue ground cover worth saving, and then level the ground off and start trying to grow grass.

We just had 4 cubic yards of compost delivered. We better get to work.