Gardening Frustrations

[queerbychoice]

My gardening efforts are not going well. The fuchsia, blue flax, and monkeyflower that I bought most of a month ago all look like they're on the brink of death now. And the yard remains full of foxtails, no matter how many of them I pull. I'm having fantasies of somehow hauling several feet of rocks and sand and mulch and anything else that I know for sure has no weed seeds in it already into Susan's back yard and just completely burying everything that's there right now and starting over. I don't know how else to get rid of the stupid weeds! The dirt is wonderful, but I think maybe it's too wonderful, because the weeds love it too much. I think I want to try gardening in adobe bricks instead. Or serpentine. Or any of the other soils that practically nothing in the world can grow in. I think the change would be refreshing. Short of that, I think I need so much of the strongest, most horrible herbicides available that I could flood the whole yard with herbicide in a huge pool up to the height of the fence and just let it wallow in that for a year, and at the end of the year maybe I could have the yard classified as a toxic Superfund site so the federal government would clean it up for me and then when they were done I could finally grow plants other than weeds.

Comments

One Word For You:

[zdamiana.livejournal.com]

Mulch.

Also, one book recommendation for you: Gaia's Garden: A guide to home-scale permaculture by Toby Hemenway. This book will give a lot of detail about the technique of smother mulching, which you may find helpful.

Re: One Word For You:

[queerbychoice.livejournal.com]

So far, my experience with mulching has been that I put down four huge bags of shredded redwood bark, and 95% of it vanished within a month after it was put in. From what I read online, this is not how shredded redwood bark mulch normally works. It's supposed to last for years. I think the massive amounts of dog doo may be causing it to break down faster, or just causing bits of it to be thrown away along with the dog doo. But neither of those seems able to fully account for how fast it disappears. Maybe the weeds just grow up through it so fast that I can't see it anymore. That book might help.