Herban Sprawl

Yesterday, my neighbor was in her lounge chair, reading, while I toiled in my yard. I was insanely jealous, because that’s what I want to be able to do - look out at a weeded and cleaned up yard that is free of the noxious weeds I have spent 20 years fighting back.

When we bought this house, there was a row of weed trees that ran up one side of the back yard. A friend and his chainsaw with me following, painting the stumps with straight Round-Up got rid of the big trees, but then I spent the next 19 years yanking out miles of orange paper mulberry roots. They are still in the yard, but they are dwindling. Just not fast enough for my taste.

On one side of our house is a lot that used to belong to the former owners of this one. They sold it in the 1960s and a two story colonial was built on it. That back yard is a semi-terraced nightmare of weed trees and vines. A veritable jungle, neighbors have complained to the city about it, and periodically the owners have made a half-hearted attempt to clean it out. There is a large tree that is listing toward our house. With all this rain, I am waiting for the thing to uproot and land on the roof.

Behind our lot is a 12′x60′ piece of real estate that belongs to the Star City. By some quirk on their books, there is the expectation that the homeowner (we) will maintain this steep weed paradise. And for many years I did. Then my knees started to object. Again, it was a matter of hiring out the chainsaw detail and dealing with the residue with Round-Up and back-breaking, knee-compromising work. I just don’t have the physical ability I did twenty years ago, so it is a terrible mess. It’s embarrassing to hear the walkers bitch about it as they go by on the street that borders the mess, but what they don’t seem to realize is exactly how steep the damn thing is, and that it doesn’t even belong to us. I’m not spending my paltry teacher half-retirement check on that. Period. End of statement. Unfortunately, that mess likes to leak over the property line, which means I have a 6′x60′ piece of real estate to which I must apply myself sometime in the near future.

Yesterday, my task was to chop down the rest of the Pokeweed Forest that had infested my prairie garden. I had another square-stemmed thing that had gotten to be taller than me, as well. I cut those down, and their roots were easy to cut out of the dirt. Poke, on the other hand, has a root system that might need a stump driller! Last year I thought I was being so smart. I cut the poke, then, using a disposable dripper, squirted straight nursery strength Round-Up into the hollow stems. I thought sure this would poison the source of the weed. No such luck. They were back with a vengeance! Of course, today, they are lying, limp as a spent unowhat, on the curb!

The prairie garden gained some new plants last year, and they are doing well. The cimifugia racemosa (Queen of the Prairie) is likewise doing well. I hope it will bloom heartily this year. The pink plumes are glorious. After hacking down some massive mulleins, the plants now can breathe. Again, those root systems came out pretty easily. Bless their hearts.

My past gardening sin has been a mixture of the fear of pruning, and a stubborn resistance to moving plants around. Somehow that seems to have left me, and I find myself looking at a dogwood and its low growing branches with a saw on the brain. I whacked down a pair of buddleias with nary a pang of guilt. When I planted them, the witch hazel tree was a skinny, gangly teenager. The dogwood was middle school sized. Now that both of those have matured, the buddleias, which are well-established and can get huge, are in the way. The peony can’t get any light or air. I may love those buddleias, but if they don’t work there, they can’t stay. I think I’m finally maturing as a gardener!

We have more scattered thunderstorms in our forecast for this week, which is good for me. I have to dig out the summer clothes from the depths of the kneewall storage, and there are other indoor projects that I can do. But for every hour I can spend digging up weeds, that’s even better. All the new plants are becoming well-established thanks to all this rain. The patio is ready for a second application of Round-Up, and that plan is progressing nicely.

Next up: a scoop of mulch on the truck vs. bags from Lowe’s. I’m thinking a scoop. Cheaper by far.  Just need to put air in the wheelbarrow’s tires!

That lounge chair and a book are getting closer…I can feel it!