lawn & garden

When we moved in last July, invasive Japanese Knotweed was creeping out of the woods and into our lawn. The stuff is nearly impossible to kill, since its root system can reach 10 feet into the soil and spread 20 feet horizontally. It is very, very well adapted to life in the suburban northeast.

Herbicides can be effective, but since we have dogs we were reluctant to spray the lawn with toxins. Instead, we mowed the knotweed down to nothing and covered the area with opaque tarps. Since Japanese Knotweed can lie dormant for years awaiting sunnier conditions, we knew we couldn't starve it to death, only halt its growth temporarily.

We left the tarps all winter. A few shoots sprouted up between the seams, along with some dandelions and weeds. When we finally pulled up the tarps last weekend, incredibly, a dozen green knotweed shoots had emerged underneath the tarps, without any access to sunlight. This stuff is unstoppable.

I went around on my hands and knees and dug out the rogue shoots. Then I tilled the entire area with a hoe (I am still sore). We put down grass seed yesterday and have been keeping it damp.

I know we haven't killed the knotweed, but I'm hoping the grass will come in, compete for sunlight and nutrients, and slow the knotweed down a bit. If we keep the area mowed, the knotweed won't have a chance to build up food stores and grow thick stalks. I'll let you know in a few weeks if we actually grow grass.

Do you remember the overgrown tangle growing along the driveway?

We had lilies, grass, some kind of ground cover plant, and two types of baby trees!

Over the past month I dug all of that up (again, ouch), and turned over the soil. Yesterday we put in two yellow flowering rhododendrons.

They're small now, but they can grow up to 8 feet tall and 8 feet wide, so in a few years I hope they'll cover up our ugly basement windows.

I'll probably cover the open soil with more driveway gravel.

Yay for low-maintenance bushes and yay for neatness!

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We've Been Working, Just Not Blogging

Since we last posted, the backyard has gone from looking like this:

To this:

And we've learned that raking is very good exercise.

Remember the barfy baby blue bedroom?

We painted it the same respectable colors as our bedroom:

We are still touching up, since insulating the built-in dresser was messy.

We also have to go back and repair some of the floor in our bedroom, thanks to Ellie.

She clawed through 150 years' of paint, trying to get at the men working in the basement.

Vandal.

We completed many projects during October and November, and we'll post about them this week.

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The Deck is Finished

Here is the deck from the back yard.

All those crazy overgrown plants were removed, so we'll have to figure out how to plant grass.

The new deck is much sturdier than the old one. Before:

After:

Now we have a gate close to the door of the house, so we can easily let the dogs out into the yard, or keep them penned on the deck.

The space between the new rails is too small for trapping skulls:

We're thrilled with the new deck. It looks great, the cedar smells good, and we're getting a lot of use out of it.

Our new problem is that a pair of woodpeckers have begun digging holes in the old wooden stairs and railing by the driveway:

I've watched them throwing splinters all over the driveway. Who knows what kind of delicious bugs they're finding in there. Replacing these junky stairs might be a project for next summer.

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weeds, paint, humidity, critters

This Japanese Knotweed is apparently the plant from hell. Unchecked, it will eat your whole yard, house, family, pets. Killing it involves a long, vigilant campaign of mowing, uprooting, applying herbicide, and depriving the plants of light. Even then, the knotweed can lay dormant for up to 20 years until conditions become more favorable.

I want to avoid spraying weedkiller; no matter how safe Monsato says Roundup is, I don't want poison near me, my dogs, or in my ground water. After our neighbor was kind enough to mow the knotweed down to its stumps, we staked four heavy duty tarps over the entire patch.

It's putting up a fight under there, the pointy stems trying to slice their way through to sunlight, but without photosynthesis, it should eventually tire out. We'll see. Since the knotweed is in a low part of the yard, we may eventually fill in soil right over the tarps and plant grass.

Three coats of primer and two coats of paint later, the pink laundry room is finally green and white. I love the colors, but the lumpy wallpaper underneath looks awful. It was already painted, and we just didn't have time to peel it off before the washer and dryer were delivered. Eventually, I'd love to replace the wood laminate cabinets and redo the walls.

Rod installed a dehumidifier in the basement, and hooked it up to the sump pump. Thank god, because that basement is spider city, and I was getting tired of going down there to empty out the water. The basement is still ridiculously wet. It needs a barrier of plastic and crushed rock to keep out groundwater. I will have nothing to do with it. Too creepy down there.

Spiders, earwigs, and possibly mice have had the run of this place for almost a year. I'm shooing them out, room by room, and sucking up their homes with our new shop-vac. I feel like Mary Bailey fixing up 320 Sycamore in It's A Wonderful Life.

Next projects: paint the pink for girls and blue for boys bedrooms classy, boring colors before the movers bring our furniture on the 26th. New roof at the end of the month. Also, should we replace the rotten deck this year or buy a new refrigerator? Should we get an energy audit and learn where we need insulation? (Do we really want to know?)

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