My Garden

My husband and I are at odds over the yard.

He tries valiantly to cut and maintain a lush carpet of green grass
every year. He does the mowing himself, and likes to hire a service to
do all the bug/weed/fertilizer spraying. And in general, we end up with
nice looking grass.

That is, if you like that sort of thing. For me, I'm not a grass fan.
Grass requires more maintenance than my rose bushes, and its flowers
aren't exactly colorful. Nor can you eat it, unless you're a cow.

It gets into everything, especially my flower beds. Grass is the worst
weed in our yard. The only way I've been able to kill grass that has
infiltrated my garden beds is by waiting till winter and spraying the
whole bed with Roundup, hoping that I'm not damaging dormant perennials.

And removing chunks of sod to add a new bed is backbreaking,
hand-blistering work. I know, I do a lot of it myself. I've tried
using roundup and/or weed fabric + mulch to get rid of the grass without
actually digging it out of the beds, and it just comes back. Usually
right in the middle of a plant where I can't spray it with weed killer.

I spent a lot of time outside this weekend working on the garden. Note
I don't say "working on the yard". I filled in vacant beds with flowers
(I seem incapable of choosing a plant that doesn't flower or produce
edible fruit), removed a small dead tree and replaced it with a pair of
raspberry bushes, transplanted a small volunteer pine tree out of one of
my flower beds, and set up the hanging baskets on our front porch with
fresh coconut liners and petunias. I love petunias in hanging baskets.
That volunteer pine tree was added to a newly-dug bed and flanked by a
pair of evergreen shrubs (wait, those aren't edible...but neither is the
pine tree and it needed friends).

I also started to dig grass out from under a new set of stepping stones
that lead from the sidewalk to our front door, to set them into the
ground better (I am not a fan of house walks that lead only to the
driveway--as if every visitor must arrive by vehicle and never by foot).
The stones are made out of recycled grocery bags and look really nice,
though I need one more--they were sold in 3-packs though. So I may be
making my own stepping stone to fill the gap (a nice mosaic tile one
with the house numbers or kiddo hand prints maybe).

I gave up quickly on digging out the grass under them. It's a huge
pain. And I didn't have any sand to help level the bumpy clay left once
the grass was gone. Instead, I proposed to my husband that we just turn
that whole side of the front yard into a large planting bed. He wasn't
too keen on killing that much grass. Alas.