Weed Wars

This year seems to be a bad year for weeds in my backyard. Combine the drought with the prohibition of Weed and Feed, and you have a recipe for disaster.

My parents and in-laws all have lovely, lush lawns, and I am always admiring them as they are in severe contrast to my lawn this year.

If your lawn is like mine, you may have had a thick, green lawn in the spring, thanks to all the rain. You may have aerated and seeded and fertilized in the spring, and only had a few weeds to contend with.

Then the rain stopped for pretty much ever, and our grass died, and the weeds were thinking, "Hey, look! We could totally grow over there [pointing to the dying grass patches]"...

I've asked Joel to start chipping from the crabgrass patches.

...and "voila": weeds galore. Specifically, crabgrass. Tons of it. Everywhere. Its only saving grace is the fact that it is always green, so from far away, it looks okay.

I spent a few hours removing some of the crabgrass, but I just ended up getting frustrated at how much work still needed to be done, even after filling about half of a yard waste bag with crabgrass carcasses. Then, I called in the professionals and had two lawn analyses done. The results were unsatisfactory. My lawn needs help!

I'm amazed at how quickly a lawn can transform from a thick, healthy pile of grass to a rag-tag, messy pile of weeds with a few blades of grass in between.

I had one little thought about weeds, and as much as I hate them, I have to give them a little bit of credit:

When grass and plants die, weeds thrive. Weeds grow where nothing should grow (through cracks and cuts in concrete, out of gravel driveways, in the middle of a patch of dead grass). Weeds can live quite happily through the most averse conditions: extreme heat, drought, full sun. Weeds just grow.

I don't necessarily want to encourage you to "be like a weed"--I still have a pretty big vendetta against them, so I won't go that far. However, there's something to be said about their resiliency, strength and determination.

I saw online once (I think it might have been a blog title) the phrase: "Grow Where You're Planted." Isn't that an interesting way of looking at life? Weeds grow wherever they end up germinating, and in that simple phrase above, someone has encouraged people to kind of do the same: to be strong in the face of adversity, to stand, unwavering, on a solid foundation, and to let yourself grow and develop and learn and live life in the place where you were planted. Thankfully, the reason why you were "planted" somewhere (a city/town, within a community of certain people, a certain profession, a certain church), wasn't to be an annoyance or to be destroyed with boiling water or to be plucked out with disgust (like weeds), but to improve, change, inspire and create.