I don't know how it started, really. One minute I was sitting on the back porch, thinking of working on a new embroidery design, and the next I was head-down in flower beds, pulling "sticky weed."
This stuff is awful. Even the leaves will stick to anything they touch - when you pull it up, it won't let go of your hand - and when it goes to seed it produces millions of tiny, sticky green balls. I pulled up a wheel-barrow load of the stuff and had to de-ball myself before I could go back in the house.
While pulling weeds, I found a bloom on a David Austin rose that I thought had long since died. It was in full sun when I planted it, umpteen years ago. For the past ten years or more, it's lived in the shade of a volunteer crape myrtle tree that we should've cut down the minute we discovered it. When I saw the bloom, I decided that I should dig the rose up and move it to where it could get some sun (there are precious few of those places in our yard).
Problem: the rose is embedded in crape myrtle roots. I dug and dug, and couldn't budge it, and in the process knocked off every spindly cane on the bush. (I put one of the canes in a vase of water, hoping it'll root.) The only thing I know to do is cut down the crape myrtle. We ruined our electric chainsaw while cutting back Nanny's crape myrtles last month. The Husband said he will buy a new one this week, and we will tackle the crape myrtle this coming weekend. (I told him to buy some stump killer, too.)
After battling the rose bush for about an hour, I decided that I need to kill everything in our yard and start over. Every bed in the yard is choked with phlox. In addition to the sticky weed, we also have a crown vetch problem. And a chameleon vine problem. And poison ivy and Virginia creeper. Plus seedlings from every tree in the neighborhood. I can't keep all of this stuff at bay. It's going to wrap up our house! Though I hate the thought of using Round-Up in our yard, it looks like that's the only way to win this battle.
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