War

Yesterday when I said that today the Real Work on the front yard would begin, did you think I meant I'd tackle pulling up the rest of the old dead sod in the new planting bed?

Bwahahahaahhahahahhhh!!!!   (She laughs maniacally.)

Unfortunately, no.  Sadly, tragically, painfully, no.

You see, my front yard has-- it shames me to say it-- nutsedge.  Also known as nutgrass, it is a curse and a scourge and this afternoon was devoted to beginning the process of eradicating it.

Which, I admit, is not the full process some authorities say can and must be completed.  The authorities, many of the ones I read online, at least, say that to eliminate nutsedge you must dig out at least 18 inches of soil and dispose of it.  And not in the borough yard waste dump, either, where it will get ground up and mixed in with the free mulch and spread, spread, spread.  No, burn it, nuke it, bury the ashes twenty feet deep somewhere in the Sahara, send hem to Mars.  Because, according to the authorities, if you don't, the nutsedge will take over your whole lawn, and maybe the whole world!

Bwahahahahahahhahahh!!!!  

See all the pretty yellow-green grass?  Well, it isn't.

In the new planting bed.  Not good at all,

But do I lstrike you as the kind of person who can accomplish that much digging before she reaches retirement age?  Good grief, what am I supposed to do, rent a blinking backhoe?  And where am I supposed to put all that waste dirt, and how the heck am I supposed to put it there?

So I'm fighting this war much the way the UN does its "conflicts"-- with just enough effort to keep the enemy at bay, in the hope that if I'm persistent enough it'll get bored and give up trying to take over my whole lawn.  This means I only dug down four or five inches, or as far as I could see the nuts, which are about a half an inch long.  Yes, yes, I realize there have to be a lot more nutlets that go way deeper than that, microscopic ones hiding away and waiting to mature and send up more shoots.  But I already have seven or eight 45 gallon bags of sedge and dirt to convince the trash haulers to carry away to the landfill without charging me extra, and those were filled to the point where I could barely lift them.  I have to fight a constant war of attrition here.  I'm keeping my fingers crossed and following the plan of a minority of online anti-nutsedge warriors.  That is, get the worst of it while the shoots are short and young like mine are, accept that they'll send up new shoots two or three times more, dig those out in their turn, and let them wear themselves out.

Dug out, to some degree

 I noticed that the worst of the nut infestation is centered in the thatch.  Oh, yeah, thatch.  My front lawn has about two and a half inches of it. No wonder it's brown.  I probably need to buy a thatch rake and grub it all up.  I mean, I know I have to grub it all up, and I may have to break down and buy a thatch rake to do it.  I also am forced to notice that some of the nutsedge is growing up through the still-healthy grass.  I gather that chemical warfare is the best way to tackle that, with a selective herbicide.

I'll see what we have available for sale at work.

Here's what the nuts look like

More dug out

It's my own damn fault the nutsedge is there.  Last summer, when the grass got fertilizer-burned, I noticed two or three sprigs of it, but did nothing about it.  I'd had it in the yard before, but the density of the lawn grass had always crowded it out.  But now with all the bare patches, there's nothing to stop it.  And as I've been down on my knees putting in the new brick edge, I've been forced to notice that all those little bright yellow-green plantlets are not fresh bluegrass, but the delightful sedge.

The good thing (if anything can be said to be good about this) is that the thatch comes up very easily with with my steel garden trowel.  And that the stuff doesn't grow as well in dry weather, which we've had for over a week.  The bad thing is that as disgusting as it is to have nutsedge in the grass, it'd be worse if the infestation took over the new landscape bed.  Grass you can subject to total war with Round-Up or whatever and just start over.  Shrubs and perennials aren't so easily sacrificed.  You don't want to have to destroy the village in order to save it.

Visions-- and Realities

Even before early 2008 when I laid out the crape myrtle bed beside the two steps down to the front sidewalk I've had an idea.  A dream.  If I wanted to be grandiose, I'd say I've had a Vision.  It was to pull up a third to a half of the front lawn in a great curvaceous triangle and convert it to a landscaping bed.  With a footpath winding through it for the lawn mower, the postman, and the neighborhood kids.  And a little paved seating area just big enough for a bistro table and and chair or two, to make up the lack of a front porch to sit out on on summer evenings.

But I had such nice grass it would be a pain and a shame to pull it up, and besides, I didn't have the money.  So a dream it remained.

But this past summer of 2012, that dry summer of 2012, I stinted on watering the lawn.  Economizing.  My sprinkler attachment wasn't working right anyway, and I didn't want to spring for a new one.  But the Scott's guy were still coming round to do the treatments, and at the height of the dryness he applied fertilizer or weed killer or both and over half the yard fried out and turned yellow.

No, I didn't call up Scott's to gripe about it.  Never got around to it.  But eventually, I knew, I'd have to get around to deciding what to do about my largely-dead lawn.  Happily, most of the brown places were where I wanted the shrubs and perennials and things.  Was it time to landscape on some scale, or should I just reseed the lawn?

Whatever I determined, I figured it wouldn't hurt to get rid of the dead grass.  Started the process last November.

Pretty pathetic.  I used to have grass.

That was all for 2012

Was hoping to get it all stripped and amend the soil and maybe overseed it, last winter.  But it was too cold and dark in the evenings and I had other things I could do inside.

So come this spring when the lawn didn't revive on its own, I figured it was now or never.  High time to do the landscaping, though very much on the cheap.  Still, I didn't do anything tangible about it for several weeks.  I had the idea I wanted to design it all out in AutoCAD.  Theoretically could have.  My student-edition AutoCAD license expired in December 2008, but I've got a free download drawing program, DraftSight, on my computer.  But, gulp! it's been so long that I can't remember the blinking commands.  And my computer is so slow it's hard to load the program, let alone use it.  In fact, I haven't done any machine drawing these past few years with anything but SketchUp.  Nothing wrong with SketchUp per se; it'd be cool to lay out my front garden in 3D.   But that'd mean measuring and reckoning elevations and slopes, which I simply have no time to do.  Nevertheless, three or four weeks ago I got out there with the tape and documented some of the existing conditions in the front border  I even pulled out my AutoCAD course textbook to refresh my skills.

But a couple Saturdays ago, as I mentioned in the previous post, I came across a good deal on eggplant and broccoli plants at an area grocer.  Why not put them in the front yard, where it's sunny and the dog won't get them?  The day after, Sunday the 19th, something switched on in my pea brain and I thought, why bother with a drawing?  Why not just get out there and do it?  Or maybe I didn't think.  I just gathered up my steel tape measure, a couple of garden spikes, and a roll of string and started scribing arcs in the dead-and-alive grass of my pathetic front lawn.

Came off the existing border towards the west end

As I went I took the hoe and made the arcs good and obvious.

Note tape measure and string

Petered out before I hit the sidewalk.  Hit a tough clump of grass and left it till later.

Just for fun, pulled out the first few bricks and  set them on the ground to mark the new line.

The following Saturday the 25th I took the hoe and started hacking out divots along the scribed line.  Only got so far before the dryness of the soil, the stubbornness of some of the grass, and a weird hitch in my right hip got the better of my persistence.  I quit digging till it would rain again.

Carts and carts full of divots.  It only gets worse.

Cut the grass in the new bed short.  Maybe it'll die and be easier to remove.

Still, I didn't see any harm in beginning the edging.  A line of bricks has defined the front border for years before I got here.  They look perfectly fine, so why not reuse them?  And why not just sink them flush in the earth the way the previous owners did?  True, they do tend to let the grass stolons into the flower beds, but it's not like they heave or anything.  Why make a big deal of it?

So I pried more bricks out of the old border and laid them along to make the new one, until it got too dark to continue.

The next day, Sunday the 26th, I laid in more bricks for the new border, till all the ones in the former border were used.

Last one!

Almost there.

And then I borrowed my neighbor's edger.  Why?  Because until I had a clean line between the lawn and the sidewalk I couldn't possibly know how to bring the curve of my new planting bed down to the pavement.

Once that big hank of overgrown grass was hacked off, I could finish the brick border, just as dusk fell.  Had to supplement them with some I collected for the borders in the back.  Not quite the same, but close enough.

In for a landing.

By the 29th it had rained, and I didn't get called in to sub.  But I only finished the edging in the back yard.

Before, with two or three years of overgrowth

During

After.  

Nothing got accomplished in the front until today-- And the ground has dried out again.

Never mind.  It took over three hours, but the front sidewalk is edged and swept.  Ditto the grass along the curb.

The edger gives me a line for my dad's old grass knife to follow.  LOL

Hacking through the jungle.

Took it to my neighbor's roof drain outfall, a little past the property line.

Sidewalk done, both sides

The curb line gets it now.

Can I leave that dirt in the gutter for the street sweeper to pick up?

No, clean it up.  They don't come by half the time anyway.

Tomorrow, if I can get to it, God willing, the real work begins.