This is what I get to look at out the window. When I moved in that woodchip path was mud, there was a tangled stand of so many trees of heaven their (also tangled) roots put out enough poison to kill grass, both sides of the path (the far side is wildflowers now) AND the ledge within the retaining wall were overrun with dandelions, deadnettle, nettles, other broadleafs, bittercress, seafoam, and crabgrass, a thick tangle of blackberry canes hung off the fence on the other side of the chimney, that bush in the foreground was grown high enough to block the window, and the trees had a ton of thin, twisted, dead, witchy branches at window level and an overgrown carpet canopy up above blocking light and making the whole area look like a cartoon haunted forest.
Here’s some more Biodiverse Memes! Y'all are strongly encouraged to repost to Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram and other websites. No need to credit.
Some of these are new, some are from earlier. Wanted to make some (somewhat) positive ones since the point isn’t to be “anti-lawn,” it’s to get people to appreciate how beautiful and important biodiversity is and how easy it is to have biodiversity in your surroundings :3
Go wild, give them to the other websites so the people there can see
If you’re trying to get a mossy lawn back to grassy, as I did with the upper backyard, the issue is moss will take over where the dirt is kept waterlogged, you need to aerate it for drainage.
Okay, more picking off crap grass, four buckets of it, also some chopping some thin branches up into debris kibble, and realizing a lot of the “firewood” I’ve been husbanding is really too thick to burn intact but a bitch to split, so if I really want to make good use of these fruits of the yard I can just dump them in a depression to the side of Blueberry Hill to rot over 5 years.
Tomorrow the last of that, using staples to shape some branches’ growth around trunks, and preparing some planters to receive some plants currently in areas that’re gonna be landscaped away.
Ok, more grass weeding, cleaned the bottom backyard so well there was nothing on the grass and mowed it, brought the felled mimosa branches to be chopped up.
Alright, went to clean up the lower backyard, do more grass weeding in the side yard, then went to finish smashing Blueberry Hill but I’m closer to the energy limits of my creatine dose and it was another tease, only halfway. Then I blocked some parking spaces for the crew coming tomorrow (at 8 AM!) to get up around power lines and trim the last untouched tree on the property.
Okay, the grass is long enough I can recognize species at a glance by blade or form or color, so thinning it out before I mow, took out a lot of bunchgrasses, spikegrasses, and beachgrasses, not to mention a few stray deadnettles, some clover I wiped out last year but not before it set seed, and seafoam is back, that’s the real tiny stuff. No more bittercress, though.
Taking a break for some salmon rice and I’ll be back out.
Alright, got several bucketloads and dumped them on the ramp which now isn’t draining into a matrix of twigs so much as shrinking from drying.
Then built almost all of the next bonfire, the lower backyard’s really clear now.
So next is
getting mud for the retaining wall
finishing and burning the fire
stringing a rope to block a gap in the fence with a tarp
Okay, the grass is long enough I can recognize species at a glance by blade or form or color, so thinning it out before I mow, took out a lot of bunchgrasses, spikegrasses, and beachgrasses, not to mention a few stray deadnettles, some clover I wiped out last year but not before it set seed, and seafoam is back, that’s the real tiny stuff. No more bittercress, though.
Taking a break for some salmon rice and I’ll be back out.
Okay, went to smash that last bit of Blueberry Hill, found some steady ground to the side but after a few swings realized it was steady cause it was thin dirt atop some still-intact planks, so I smashed them for a while.
Also weeding, clearing out this one grass from the front that’s much taller (and leggier and unplush) that used to be like 80% of the cover.
Taking an hour break then I’ll go back out, got some other stuff in mind.
