Take this yard and shove it

Blogging is no piece of cake, what with the need to motivate the research staff, root out cliches and watch the profanity, but after all is said and done at the end of the day, it’s as simple as pie compared to yard work. Which has again reared its ugly head.

I started the morning wandering around with a landscape guy, who didn’t take long to figure out I’m a lot dumber than I look, at least where it comes to planting things and keeping them alive until his pickup is out of sight. He made some notes and promised to come back with a plan even a chimp could follow, but I’m not optimistic. Look, it’s like Zarathustra said: I am become death, destroyer of gardens. Also trees and ornamental bushes. I have good intentions, but my skill set swings between criminal neglect and lethal pruning, with nothing in between.

The guy we bought the house from loved roses. He had a nice bed of them and they were a beauty to behold that first year. Now they’re all brown canes and wicked thorns, withered and mutated as though we’d been mulching them with spent reactor fuel. I’d take them out pronto except those thorns discourage interaction. For now, I just brood at a safe distance, and slowly lay my plans.

I can’t be sure, but I think the lawn used to be nicer too. It used to be green, for one thing. Now it’s dead bermuda grass punctuated by strange weeds, and patches of bare earth where the dog
performs frenzied maneuvers without regard to aesthetics. How did it get this way? Does it need water or something? Fertilizer? My impulse now is to carpet-bomb the whole area with a foot of cedar mulch and be done with it, but no doubt that would create a different set of problems.

Ah, spring. Young men’s hearts turn to love, and older men’s hearts turn to Roundup.