Garden Update

As I mentioned in the previous post we originally planned on taking a three day vacation this weekend. Even though those plans fell through Adam decided to take Friday off so we could have an extra day to work around the house. Unfortunately we had another set of original plans that did not come to fruition. We have mentioned once or twice about our wire grass issue. It continues to love our back yard. We have gone through several plans of attack to get rid of this grass and have a successful vegetable/flower garden. Plan A was to build raised boxes and bring in new soil and cover the bottom wire-grass-filled soil with newspaper and weed defense fabric. This plan quickly got very expensive. Plan B was to use Round Up very sparingly to kill the wire grass and use our existing soil. We planned on tilling this weekend, adding in some compost, and using landscape timbers to outline our boxes. We were pretty excited until we closely looked at the garden area that we planned on tilling and saw very active wire grass. We have used Round-Up twice now on this section and you can see that the ends are starting to die off, but there is definitely still more green than brown so we are waiting as patiently as we can for the Round-Up to do its thing before we till and plant.

Here is a picture of what we want the wire grass to look like before we till.

Brown and dry. This wire grass reared its ugly head much earlier in a different part of our backyard where we have a couple of crape myrtles growing. We targeted this area with Round-Up and saw great results so we are doing the same thing with the veggie garden area. It is just taking a while. A very long while.

Since we couldn't make garden progress, we tackled a couple of other projects. We installed a roll down shade on our back porch to keep the intense afternoon sun out of our dining room. We also planted some new flowers for the front porch. There are some Tiny Tunias (far left), Coleus (purple stuff in the middle), Blue Danube Ageratums (far right), and then the spiky grass in the back and the green trailing vine in the front (don't know the proper names for those).

While I was out snapping some photos I caught a bee working its magic on one of our purple flower plants (yep - don't know the name for this one either.) And finally, check out our first rose bloom of the season. There are at least 20 other buds ready to open - should be beautiful!

Very thankful for our April showers that have brought some gorgeous May flowers!