LaurenandLloyd.com
where our wasted time becomes your wasted time
[twocol_one]Pros
Pretty.
Don’t need to be mowed???
I think they ward off vampires.
better than cat’s paw
[/twocol_one]
[twocol_one_last]Cons
Yard Nazi neighbor
Technically weeds
Lauren might be a vampire.
may be harbinger of alien conquest
[/twocol_one_last] 
Feel free to add items to either list.
Warning: Lauren says that this post will not be exciting.
There were a couple of bare spots in the… in the… in the area of the back yard that doesn’t have a name yet. You know, the spot with the mulch and the rocks and the fire. Well, Brad started filling it in before he left, but I think he wants me to take more of an interest in the part of our house that is outside the house. So he left some obvious things that (a) I would be able to recognize as needing to be done and (b) would be able to do.
So I picked up some Pine Bark Nuggets (which I can’t say without thinking of the song No Name City from Paint Your Wagon). And proceeded to pretty much just dump it anywhere then kick it around a little bit. Mission accomplished.
Well, almost accomplished. We still need to figure out what to call that part of the outside of the house.
We’ve never really worried about weeds in the yard. I’d say our yard is about 60% grass (3-4 varieties) 20% clover and 20% of what pickier people might call weeds.
But, as Lauren says, “What? They’re green.”
This has been my philosophy too, so apart from an occasional foray against the dandy-lions, it’s been mostly live and let live here.
Until this spring.
It started innocently enough. Just another weed to green up the place. But this weed was different. It goes by many names: Ground Ivy, Creeping Charlie, Gil-on-the-ground, Alehof, Creeping Jenny among others.
It stared off as two small patches, but they have been growing and attempting to join together. I knew that if they joined forces there would be no stopping them, so something had to be done. I took a specimen to Merl’s Garden Center and they gave me a bottle. They asked if I wanted the specimen back, but I said I had more at home.
The patches are about 20ft x 15ft and 30ft x 30ft, and today I covered them in toxins. It’s better to treat it in the spring or fall when it’s still growing, but this stuff has never stopped growing. Heck, you can sit outside and watch it grow. The label says that you can see results within 24 hours, and that you should retreat (I believe they mean “reapply” rather than “fall back”) in 10-14 days. So consider this a “before” post.
This is why I don’t like the outdoors. I was upstairs and happened to look out the window and saw this in the backyard.
It’s been raining buckets for several days now, and the wind blew a honkin’ piece of a dead branch down and it stuck about two inches into the ground. Good thing no varmints were around – that could have been a Brad.
I do like when things land sticking up, remember?
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Today Lloyd got up, showered, got dressed for school, followed me out the driveway, drove to the city limits of Seward…..then turned right around, came home, and cleaned up the yard.
He did not have school today, even though when I asked this weekend, “Are you out on Monday? We’re going to have a lot of children at the center because Seward is out.” He lied and said, “No.”
He did this once before. The last time he cleaned up the whole basement. It’s such a shock because his deception is so thorough. I mean….driving away? Dressed up? Coming home is so disorienting. “Why is he home? Why is he wearing that? Why is it so clean? Am I dead?”
Here are some photos of his amazingness, though they are only meaningful if you can understand that we HATE yardwork, and every nook and cranny was filled with a foot of compacted leaves and dead weeds. Brad has been our only lifeline to greenery, though Lloyd has really stepped it up recently. It’s really too bad that there are no ‘before’ pictures. Lloyd said he raked up seventeen billion trash cans of leaves from the front yard and side garden.
