We had planned to go skating, then borrow Terry’s truck, and today we’d get some progress on the taxes; but…
The lawn crew called up and wanted to strip the sod (which we have wanted done) so we can do what we want to do to the front lawn, to equal the Glorious Pond. So we cancelled skating and rushed to get ready.
Things never go smoothly. The crew had trouble with the stripper, so our yard now looks like the aftermath of one three-year-old using the dog clippers on his sister. It’s going to need a lot of work with the mattock, and for the first time, this lately-sedentary body registered its first strong aged-based protest about the mattock-work. Ow. Re-ow! Besides, it’s a blow to my pride. But slower and steady will still get it.
We also consulted with our neighbor about the property line—and our crew goofed and chewed out a piece of his lawn while we were trying to haul a wheelbarrow around to the back.
But—we now (sort-of) have the lawn out. No more watering the whole yard. No more mowing. No more fertilizer or anti-fungus treatments. Hurrah for that.
We didn’t get to to get the truck and get the weeping birch out of the store lot, but we did lay weed cloth between the houses and are going to have to get some mulch: this was part of the deal with the neighbor: we create a bark-bed between the houses; and then we set up so he can do a retaining wall, to join our future retaining wall in front. So I’m going to mollify our neighbor about the missing grass by laying the first tier of his retaining wall.
O OSG, there will soon be another truck dumping 7 yards of mulch at our place. If you would like another lawn party, with snacks and drinks by the Glorious Pond…heh…we will be game.
Carolyn, pls check your email!
I hope the lawn company gave you a discount, in view of the mattock-work and the upset neighbor!
Several years ago I had a chance to rescue dozens of iris from the neglected beds of the late iris-breeder who had lived two houses away from us. My part-time workmen and I THOUGHT that we got the Bermuda-grass killed in the new bed, along 90 feet between the street and sidewalk, where we put them. They have been gorgeous several springs since. But they sure look ragged in late summer when the Bermuda is about as tall as the iris. Can’t mow it, can’t spray it, and we’ve tried to dig it from between the plants with only partial temporary success.
I’ve watched eager optimistic gardeners till late-winter Bermuda to create a community organic garden plot. They politely listened to me explain why they needed to physically remove the stuff, rather than chop it up into even more propagating units, but they were too eager to get their bed apparently beautifully prepared and planted. I cringed. Sure enough, by June the garden was utterly buried in grass.
😆 Spectracide brand has a grasskiller spray that supposedly doesn’t harm other plants. We have some, and iris is one of my concerns, too, because there is grass in an area I want to plant in iris…I have a large collection. But if it’s really bad, it might be worth pulling the whole bed, rototilling it and raking the grass bits and roots out. If you clip the iris tops in the tradition upside-down V cut, and let them dry out bare-root, you would have time to prepare that bed and do a little chemical treatment too. Replant in the fall. Next spring, hopefully, you would have grass-free iris.
It isn’t organic and I have *very* mixed feelings about using it but you could use a weed killer (Roundup) with a wick. We made one with a tampon and a drip feed from the watering system. You dab the roundup on the leaves of the plant….very carefully. The drawbacks: It is Roundup (which does break down quickly), it is a tedious procedure, and you should *never* use it around fish or when rain is predicted for 48 hrs. If you do decide to use it (and as I said I have many doubts about this, but we were a commercial garden) follow the instructions carefully; we wore haz-mat suits. Sounds attractive, doesn’t it? s.
Spectracide did not kill any perennials, but it did brown many leaves. It took them most of the summer to look good agin. This was when we had the longest drought in thirty years so that may have had something to do with it. 😉
I would have been quite upset with the sod-removal process. If they say they can take it off, they should be taking it off, not leaving clumps here and there. After all, what are you paying them to do? They also need to consider compensating your neighbor for damage to the adjoining property. You hired them so you wouldn’t have to do the manual labor of preparing the yard for the next phase. I’d be writing a not-so-nice letter to the company’s owner. Perhaps signed by Tabini-aiji with a promise to File Intent if they don’t come back and rectify the situation. That’s just plain wrong for them to do that to you and Jane.
Part Duex: (Spence, forgive me if that’s incorrect!) Just because THEY had trouble with THEIR machine is no reason why YOU should have to be subjected to manual labor. At best, they should have offered to come back with another machine, or have gotten that one fixed and come back to finish the job they started. Or, given you a significant discount, oh say 75%, with the understanding that you won’t File Intent on them.
Yep, Jane’s pretty hot, viewing it by morning’s light. It is a mess. But we did get the job at a severe discount—I guess you get what you pay for.
And to add to our joy—Spokane weather. Unlike Oklahoma, where you can literally see the weather coming 3 days away: what’s in Colorado comes rolling down in 3 days—Washington is cut up with deep river chasms and valleys, not to mention a couple of mountain ranges, so weather sneaks over the ridges and down the canyons and is NOT always predictable. And it’s spring. Yes, surprise! rain is coming. It’s going to rain today and tonight, then skip two days, and rain from Sunday til Wednesday. Translation: it’s going to water those grass clumps out there and they’re going to start growing. Arrrgh!
So…first we get that truck and get that birch tree out of the store lot before something happens to it. Pretty thing, a contorted birch, that will go to the front yard. We get it planted. Rain and all.
a) we do the space between the houses first: we’re going to have to order one small load of mulch. That’s comparatively easy, and that will at least solve that problem permanently (or until we decide to lay a walkway). And give us enough mulch for B.
b) we go over to the other side of the house, on the main thoroughfare, and outside the fence, and start in there with a mattock, weedcloth and mulch. If we can get the poor little Mantis to fire up, and if we need it, good. We plant the two baby hemlocks and prepare a watering method (soaker hose) that will keep them and the other plantings over there alive.
c) then we settle in and wait for dryer weather. Given time, and enough leftover mulch, we establish the base of the new retaining wall and make nice with our neighbor. We move the two foot berm of the operation piled up along the extant retaining wall. We pile it in curving mounds that will give some highs and lows to the flat lawn. We keep discouraging grass growth.
d) we do not water the front lawn, except the spruce tree, the birch, and the two rose beds near the house. We make life difficult for the grass roots that remain.
If you have access to a lot of plastic tarps and don’t mind your lawn looking third-world while you fix it, you could lay out tarps over everywhere that is not being actively worked on or already completed. Whatever is underneath will hopefully die off, leaving you with a clear field for your projects.
That is one possibility. But we have a sudden offer of a full-sized Rototiller. And the truck to haul both it and the tree. We are also laying out of skating through spring break, and if we can get that Rototiller to turn up that lawn, and rake through it, we are going to be in a lot better shape. It’s going to be a bear of a job, but we have both used a full-sized tiller, and the ground is flat and reasonable—the side near the street with its slope can be a bit problematic, but if we aim it uphill and let it climb instead of descend, and if it has a deadman’s switch-to-idle on its grip as I remember the last one having, we can do it. This is going to be a circus, and I can’t believe I am trying to do a delicate correction in the current book AND get the taxes off meanwhile—but that’s the situation we’ve got. Nothing like a little physical exercise to keep the mind sharp, eh?
The name for this is ‘solarizing’, and if you use black plastic, it pretty much cooks whatever is underneath the plastic. At least in theory; in practice it may not work as well. I understand it does lower the number of weeds (and regrowing bermuda, etc, grass).
One hopes that the rototiller has reverse tilling action, IOW, counter to the direction of travel. They give a much finer till, not to mention, I believe they’re easier to handle than the ones that drag you along by the force of the tines and the wheels. I’ve used both and will swear by the counter-tiller models. A little pricey, but hey, you’re not buying it, just borrowing.
If the weather does dry out, perhaps the spray on the clumps, give it a couple of days, and then beat up the yard with the tiller.
It’s spring in Ohio, too. It’s raining, and it’s likely to snow tonight, since the temperature is supposed to drop to around 24 degrees. (Remind me again why i moved back to Ohio? I shoulda stayed in San Diego!)
Raining here, too, or spitting. We went out to Terry’s, collected the truck and about a dozen skull-sized rocks, then headed over to the store to get the birch.
Jane cleverly used the rocks to wedge the towering pot in place (the tree is about 7 twiggy feet high, and very limber, tending to whip about. She got it home, while I got the Subaru home.
We offloaded, dug down through 6″ of grass roots left behind by our heroes, and then chopped through a dozen to twenty finger-thick hemlock roots (the mattock blade will take them out pretty handily), then hit the rock and gravel layer, and this was in about 12 inches: a posthole digger won’t work in Washington, Jane informs me, so we don’t own one. We used a pick, a mattock, a smaller mattock, and a 3-tine mattock, plus a shovel and a rake. The good thing about the soil is that once you loosen its rocks you can drive the shovel sideways with just your hands, not having to use your foot.
(In Oklahoma you have to soak the ground, which otherwise resembles a brick, and stand and hop on the shovel foot rest, driving it down inch by inch, and sometimes stand with both feet and rock back and forth—what you lift out is often pure wet pottery clay—no rock. Washington is all sand, basalt and granite bits, volcanic ash, and compost, a weird mix to call itself dirt, but everything but the gravel grows things nicely.)
We lined the hole with good potting soil and moisture-retention soil, then unpotted the tree, spread out its roots and watered the hole while putting in a mix of the good soil and the gravel. You dig in Spokane, you find geologic history up close and personal, especially when digging atop the basalt bluffs. We wedged a support of our new rocks around the base—it’s blowing a gale—then decided we had had all the fun we could stand and went inside. We ended up planting the birch on the same side of the yard as the spruce, so we could just do one side of the yard this year and have the other side all in plain bark and weedcloth while we do the retaining wall.
I are tired!
Here in Los Angeles, I’ve already had to clip three flower stalks off the rhubarb – it’s *way* too early for that, even by local standards. The grapes are leafing out, and the Muscat has its first-ever flower buds (it’s 13 years old; it’s time). The boysenberry is starting to produce flower buds, also.
I have a pot full of Asian lily ‘Oklahoma City’ that’s multiplied and is trying very hard to fill that pot to bursting. (Also, an unidentified sword-leafed plant now has flowers and is identified as Sparaxis.)
Smartcat, thanks for the wick idea. I don’t generally use any chemicals, but I will use glyphosphate occasionally. I just used it 3 weeks ago on an area that used to be veg garden years ago, and was all grass and weeds. Did a 10×20 patch in the center, far from anything else except *more* grass and weeds, and it’s ready to till now, with only a few hardy little weed-rosettes showing sorta green.
But what I want to try your wick on — I’m blessed with greenbrier (smilax), lots of greenbrier. You can mow it – it comes back. You can dig it – it comes back (amazing huge alien-creature-looking root, often two feet underground). You can’t spray it, because it’s in the middle of the prairie grasses and wildflowers, So I’ll see if I can go after it with *surgical strikes*, a little at a time.
The iris – they’re established at the rent house, which I’m selling. (I’m not very good as a landlord, I inherited the responsibility, and it’s time to acknowledge that it’s not for me.) But I don’t want to sell all the iris. So my two tenants that do work for me and I dug out the iris last week, dug out all the grass (I hope), replanted half the iris (they’ve multiplied), and we’ll finish putting the rest out at my other house this Sunday. THe ones we finished already may even go on and bloom this spring – they never dried out, and got a good rain the day they got replanted.
Weather – pah! We got SNOW on the “first day of spring”! Fortunately the 28° seems to have been brief enough that we will still get peaches and plums that were *in full bloom* at the time. Snow-hooded flower-pics at http://naturalist-amm.blogspot.com/2010/03/yep-fifth-snow.html
God help you—greenbriar. We used to call it ‘concertina-vine’ after the wire coils used in WWII to stop infantry, and I have no few scars on my ankles from having been brought up short by a loop of that thorny plague growing unseen in Johnson grass…it’s not corn that grows ‘high as an elephant’s eye’ in Oklahoma: it’s that pernicious African grass nothing can eat!
I bought a house that had little lawn, but two immense brick-encircled planters with native oak—and greenbriar. On one occasion I had to rescue the neighbor’s cat, who had ended up hanging upside down by his fluffy tail in that thicket. The cat was pretty dubious when I approached with a kitchen knife, but it was adequate to cut a combination of fur and the smaller thorny vines. I tried weedkillers, I tried everything, and finally tried to hire crews to remove it: it was a thicket as high as the roof of my house and about 15′ thick and about 30′ long in each bed.
I should have hired a bulldozer crew to take it out trees and all—but that wouldn’t have worked, because the nodes from which it grows are as much as 3′ down.
Crew after crew would approach my house, and U-turn without even stopping.
I hired one guy more desperate than the rest, and they sent away truck after truck loaded with the stuff. Three fullsized truckloads into the job, guys began quitting the crew, because they couldn’t take it. It took me a huge bill to tame the stuff, and more truckloads…you have my utter sympathy. Cutting it as near the root as possible, letting the vine die, then tying a rope around it and pulling seems to help, but you have to keep finding a new purchase-point to rope onto, and then you have to get clippers and dice up the vines into confetti. I started after the root nodes, and sent a few to Joel Hagen, who does the intriguing and highly lifelike (deathlike) alien skulls, and suggested it would be a great model. He sent me back a little clay creature made out of the stuff—which I greatly treasure.
But greenbriar is the devil’s plant. No question! Whatever you have to do to nix that stuff would be a good thing.
“The cat was pretty dubious when I approached with a kitchen knife”
Carolyn, you absolutely KILL me….! ROFL! I hereby proclaim you winner of the IntarTubz for this morning!
You got it — devil’s plant. Though, in MODERATION, it’s a good cover and food plant for wildlife. My worker-guys have gotten pretty good at getting it out of selected trees (before/after shot here: http://naturalist-amm.blogspot.com/2009/12/is-it-haystack.html ) And I did have a bulldozer once, clearing a lane through brush and blackberries. He turned up the most amazing roots. You really could model a tentacled alien from them! But you can’t dig up the really big monsters by hand — as you say, they’re too deep. I have actually used a couple in jewelry — cut pieces polish very interestingly.
Oh, and to work your way through them — the tool you need is hedge shears. Snick, snack, seven at one blow. A power hedge shear with an oscillating bar cutter works well too, once you get the knack.
It’s snowing in Boston off and on…we’ve had a few flakes, but I think spring is here….nothing like the Easter 40 yrs ago when we had a heavy wet snowstorm that closed everything including my college. My folks were driving up from Pennsylvania and had no idea what was ahead of them. It’s hard to realize how little we knew about weather then…and of course communication was still pretty minimal. Fortunately they decided to stop in New Jersey. The lilacs were in bloom next to my kitchen window. The scent of lilacs with cold wet air is a real memory jolt.
We have bull briars and wild roses here. Bull briars will climb thirty feet into a tree. They can be controlled by clipping at the base and pulling the dried vines down. It’s a matter of keeping them under control. The wild roses are tenacious to say the least. I had one come back last summer that I had cleaned out five years before. Honeysuckle can become the Monster That Ate Chicago if left unchecked.I never thought when I started gardening that my brush cutter would be one of my most useful tools!
AbigailM….I use a drip hose on a little pump sprayer with the cotton tampon at the end….taped the hose to a bamboo stake so it didn’t flop around. My memory may be faulty….I haven’t done this for several years, although I may have to this year.
Funny that what a lot of communities consider a pest plant, honeysuckle, is actually a plant that bees thrive upon. If they can get to the nectary, they’ll swarm all over the plant. We used to pick off the blossoms, pinch just above the green part of the base, and pull out the pistil and stamens, which also brought a small drop of sweet nectar.
One of my friends was telling me that her city has gone on a full battle against honeysuckle, and I’d love to have a few shrubs of it here on the farm. Oh well, one person’s garden is another person’s weedbed.
Alas, both Jane and I have one other problem with honeysuckle: we ran into a long stretch of I-40 that had honeysuckle in bloom and we kept going to sleep at the wheel, not even tired, just allergified to stupidity. We talked, we sang, we did every-3-minute checks, “Are you awake?” “How-ya doin’?” “Consciousness check!”—
We just can’t be near it without falling asleep. It’s worse than the poppies in Oz.
We did the same. Sweet memories.
Rosemary down in Sydney insted of up in Tulsa.
@joekcsnix….don’t forget the definition of a weed: a plant that is in the wrong place. I love honeysuckle, trumpet vine and wisteria…..all beautiful, all invasive if allowed to go unchecked….I think a lot of people think that planting a perennial means put in the ground and forget about it….which is what leads to towns tearing out masses of flowers. Most everything in moderation is ok…even poison ivy has its uses.
@tulrose….how is the weather? My brother is currently revisiting New Zealand.
So what on earth good is poison ivy?!? AFAIK, it’s the flea of the plant world — pernicious, hard to eradicate safely, and itchy!
In middle Ohio, the pest plant is the convolvulus, or multiflora rose. My grandfather made mighty curses upon it whenever he caught it in the pasture; the main difference between it and greenbriar is that you can eat the young shoots of greenbriar (thank you Euell Gibbons!) A patch of poison ivy and multiflora can only be safely removed with a bulldozer or backhoe, and even then may return…
We used poison ivy and beach roses along a particularly fragile length of shore front property that my mother-in- law owned on a salt water pond…..it was the only thing that kept boaters out. 😆
@smartcat: pleasantly late summer, temp in the high 20’s and my brain isn’t up to doing the conversion to fahrenheit at the moment. I’ve been waiting for a microwave to be delivered and the store finally called to say they had it down for delivery the day before I bought it (in 2011). I’m ready to scream.
Any spelling errors can be blamed on this nasty keyboard at the retirement centre where my sister lives.
Sorry to vent, it’s been that sort of day.
Well, we hope you have a nice trip all the same. I’ve experienced an Australian summer, in Perth, and I had a blouse of an unstabilized indigo blue. It turned my skin blue, from sweat and the heat—and it took weeks to get it scrubbed off! But I thoroughly enjoyed Perth! I was very briefly in Sydney and Brisbane, and recall that side of Australia as somewhat more moderate—that, or I was by then used to the temperature. 😉
Lazy C->F conversion: double and add 30. It’s not exact, but it’s close enough that you’ll know whether you want to wear a parka or a T-shirt.
Poison ivy and beach rose fence – Machiavellian horticulture.
I have deliberately not cleared the greenbrier along some ancient and weaker sections of fence. Works for horses and cows. Probably not for goats, though.
Oh, and my “plant that won’t die” that I have finally resorted to using Roundup on is elephant ears. When I bought this place, it had been foreclosed, and there hadn’t been any water on in 5 months. So what I had was a bunch of weedy grass, several dead shrubs, patches of bare dirt, and whatever plants could go for 5 months with no water (several nice trees, some jasmine that shouldn’t technically have made it, but did probably because it’s 25 years old and has a well-established root system, some roses, and some very large non-dead shrubs that I tore out because I hate plants that have to be shaped in order to look good.) So when I tore out the box-shaped shrubs, I was left with some very nice planting beds, full of good dirt, and happily put in my idea of nice plants: jasmine, lavender, roses, Mexican heather, fox-tail asparagus ferns… nice, light, airy plants that sprawl and tumble and do well with lower amounts of water. And when I did that, and actually started watering things, I learned that apparently at some point in the past, someone had planted elephant ears in this bed. I do not know how long ago, because where they started growing had been entirely covered up by the shrubs, and those were some large well-established shrubs. And I learned that elephant ears grow from tubers, and if you happen to leave the slightest bit of tuber behind, it will happily grow into more elephant ears. Which is why I have been carefully using the Roundup on them, since they are now growing through out my beautiful garden, and they definitely do not go with the light and airy feel that I like!
Oh, and of course, when I tore out the front lawn, it was mostly Bermuda grass. And I thoroughly sprayed that with Roundup before tearing the sod out. And yet, there is still some coming back. So I can sympathize on that front! It does seem like the only real way of getting rid of all of it is to tear out most of the good topsoil, and then what do you do?
What we’re about to do—borrow a fullscale Rototiller and churn up the ground bigtime, repeatedly. If we do find we can break up the soil sufficiently, we’ll use a standard garden rake to rake out the light, fluffy and still viable roots of the bermuda. If not, we’ll use our own Mantis tiller to follow the big Rototiller, because it’s designed to render the ground into fine, light till, and the grass roots will definitely be rake-able when it’s made a few passes. Once you’ve raked the roots out, even Bermuda will die. 😉