The Never Ending Battle of the Weeds

I have a battle....the battle of the weeds. Since I have been old enough to have my own home I have always wanted a nice lush green lawn like the ones I remember from my childhood. The ones you could walk barefoot in, lay in while gazing up at the clouds during the day, or roll around playing in...even if it did mean coming inside with a very itchy back.

Just like everything else, I guess grass changes too. I know my parents never used weed killer or did anything to make the grass luscious, it just was. Their extent of lawn care consisted of a good grass cutting every couple of weeks.

I am somewhat environmentally conscious so chemicals are out of the question if I can avoid it. In our home in Alabama Toby and I would painstakingly hand pick all of the weeds out of the yard so they would not take over the grass. Our acreage was fairly small in Mobile so it was pretty easy to keep it manually under control.

Here in Texas we were lucky enough to have one of the larger lots that back up to the greenbelt. Sometimes luck is bittersweet. I can keep up the front yard with my weed handpicking pretty easily...the backyard is a whole different story.

Our 2008 severe drought didn't help the situation at all. Not being used to dormancy, all the grass in central Texas this time of year looks dead to me anyway. I'm not sure what is dead and what is dormant. Because my backyard is so large I focused most of my attention on keeping the front yard maintained. Water is expensive so I was conserving on the most important part. So where there is weak grass, the weeds will overtake.

Another downfall with living in a new neighborhood is that there is absolutely no vegetation....only the two measly trees they planted when they built the house. The whole yard is grass...no bushes, no established trees, nothing that would take up any grass space in the yard.

It has been one of my goals since living here to study up on native vegetation and plant, plant, plant. Unfortunately those plants take time to grow....a very long time.

Today while I was outside digging up weeds it got me to thinking about what constitutes a weed. Who decides what is a weed? Who decides what word is a "bad" word? Who decides what is good or bad....pretty or ugly? Acceptable or unacceptable? The list could go on and on.

The particular weeds I am battling in my yard actually yield a very pretty flower in the spring. So why are they such a bad thing? Just contemplation on my part, but I do wonder.




The other day I instilled Summer's help in digging up the "weeds". She got paid extra money to do manual labor. I know I am fighting a loosing battle of the weed, but in the end I will find a solution to make both me and the weed happy.