My wonderful husband has been saying for the last couple of weeks, "We really have to get going weeding the back garden. It's completely overgrown." Then I get snarly and storm off in a huff because he's singling out my failure to hold up my end of the yard work and it's not fair because I'm doing other stuff and I have lots of other stuff to do and if he'd just give me a for-crying-out-loud *chance* to get all this stuff done and . . . yes, I'm storming off in a huff because he's right. And boy was he right. I finally steeled myself and put BC down for her nap this morning and then marched outside expecting to spend a productive but not strenuous half hour doing this task that my husband thought was necessary because I'm a dutiful wife.
Two hours later, there were carcasses all over the yard. And I was in the shower trying to scrub down to my natural skin color from the brownish-green color all over me.
When we moved in to this house, I decided that I loved the previous owners' garden plans and I would do my level best to keep the beds pristine. There were iris and popppies and cone flowers and all manner of roses and lilies. They were positioned just right and were shown to their best advantage. I not only admired the previous owner's eye for gardening, but I sincerely hoped to preserve her hard work relatively weed-free and with undying commitment.
Then BC started shrieking and woke me from my dream state, and reality set in along with a mess of weeds, some of which were enjoying eye-level fellowship with the trees in our backyard.
I'm not kidding when I say that some of the things I pulled out of the garden and threw recklessly behind me onto Matt's beautifully mown yard (and -- I found out later -- little piles of Charlie poo, making clean-up unfriendly) were over five feet tall. I honestly don't know if they are weeds. But I honestly don't care. I have of necessity adopted a new attitude toward gardening. It's called the "I Don't Like It" method. It involves stumbling upon things that may or may not have cost money, but that now do not suit my fancy. When happening upon a victim, the first step is to consider it for a moment (longer if the luxury of time permits, which it usually doesn't). I then tug gently on it to see how rooted it is, and thereafter make a game time decision about how much I like or dislike it. The primary rule is that if I don't like it for any reason, it comes out. The secondary rule takes into account the ease of removal, which may then require reconsideration of my initial decision about its worthiness to remain. There are several roses in this bed that I would rather not preserve because they are hopelessly lost causes. But roses have thorns, as we all know thanks to Poison's lyrical ballad*, and I choose not to take them on. I find myself liking them much more when I consider what a pain in the arse it is going to be to remove them. This entire decision-making process takes approximately 4.5 seconds -- often far shorter than the actual extraction.
This method's primary rule has an inverse, which is "It doesn't matter if it's a weed, I like it." Some very cute little bright purple and pink flowers were saved from certain death today by their very cuteness, though I have no clue what they are.
Having applied this method as thoroughly and subjectively as possible, I created this:
The pile of death and destruction took two lawn trash bags to contain. And the now-cleared spots you can see inside the little white fencing that Charlie enjoys stepping over cavalierly to go and eat the bushes is worlds removed from what it was before. I wish I'd taken "before" pics. You couldn't see the ground at all before I weeded.
I strongly recommend this gardening style. Mindless, impulsive carnage is ever so much more fun than the carefully planned kind.
* Could we all just take a moment to appreciate the emo sigh that is the prelude to this song. Gutsy. That was long before emo was a "thing."
Only you could approach gardening as warfare ;). On the other hand, my garden grows nothing. Wait. That's not true. The mint is doing well. And I am hoping my $4.99 jalapeno plant will yet yield a single pepper and set a new record for the world's most expensive jalapeno.
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