I’d like to revisit my previous post about the quarter-acre weed patch that I inherited with the house. The stuff in this patch was as high as my head, and just as dense. When we moved in, I had a two-year old and a newborn, and the honest truth is that I didn’t give a rat’s ass about it.
Unfortunately, a neighbor up the street did and let Babycakes know that we were cultivating an invasive plant (Johnson Grass) in our yard. I’m not entirely sure how he spotted our travesty from the road since it sits back pretty far on the property, but old eagle-eyes let us know that he was on to us.
Weed-whackers don’t cut through this stuff. You can’t mow something taller than you. It’s fairly easy to pull up, but no one’s pulling up a quarter-acre of anything. I even rented some medieval triple-bladed weed-whacker thingy (that would be the technical term) but the grass would just get wound around the blades and stop everything up.
It gets to be autumn, the Johnson Grass turns brown and Babycakes and I get the supersmart idea of just setting it on fire.
Like I said – it sits towards the back of the property so we link up every hose we own just to have one source of fire-control (because we’re all about safety here at Chez Arson), throw some lighter fluid around and light it. It smoldered, it got a little scary, it wafted huge billows of black smoke directly into our neighbor’s garage.
*ring* *ring* “Uh…Cindy….you might wanna shut your garage door.”
I guess we didn’t have enough lighter fluid since we were still left with a significant patch of only slightly charred weeds. We let it rest until next spring when I could feel ol’ eagle-eyes waiting to pounce again.
Facing this kind of pressure, I nearly wept when I noticed a neighbor having some construction done. I ran to the man in the bulldozer, laid myself prostrate and promised him my firstborn and all the cash in my purse if he’d bulldoze my weed patch. This is not an actual picture of the event, but you get the idea:
In two minutes, he had done the impossible. I had a quarter-acre of nothing. Beautiful. Best $40 and one BoyChild I ever spent.
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Check out humor-blogs for more invasive species...
Saturday, March 22, 2008
The Yard
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4 Comments :
Is this the same pile we dowsed in weed killer & kept covering with a tarp in the summer in the hopes of cooking it to kill it?
I wish I could have been there with the camera. One of the advantages of a private property is no one can see what invasive species you're harboring.
Too funny.
Robin
Dang! I completely forgot about the quest to bake it out under the tarps! I can feel another post coming on!
Robin - you would have died laughing. Your yard is perfect for hiding Johnson Grass.
I will give you $40 and my first born to send that bull dozer my way... I think things that could eat off my toes are now living in the "wilderness corner"
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