Gardening on our Own

So we let our gardener go a few months ago thinking that we would save the money and do the work ourselves. We bought a lawnmower and then the edger after seeking the advice of our neighbor who mows her yard.

Now the gardener would put some sort of pre-emergence down but I don’t think that it ever did any good as we always seems to have an outbreak of one weed or another. I’d always end up pulling weeds for days on end. Now we have weeds without any pre-emergence, I’m not sure that there are any less or more than before.

Jerry came over to give us advice on our landscaping and of course it was loaded with weeds. He advised that we should spray with round up. That would be too easy, it is better to dig out the weeds and so that is what I was doing today. Actually we’d already weeded the herb beds and had planted basil in the northern one, chili peppers in the south one and an eggplant in the NW bed. We’d cleaned out the remaining beds and found that remaining herbs would be fine for this year.

I was digging out a tough piece of Bermuda near one of the older redwood trees and between the herb boxes, feeling quite smug about not using the round-up. This clump of Bermuda was quite deep with many roots and I was trying to stand on the pavers instead of smashing in the dirt. Then I was thrown off balance and went over. I landed inside the north planter box, right on top of my newly planted basil. I ended up in a strange position and finally managed to get out of the box. My poor basil was smashed. The ground was wet and after I sat down, all of the wet dirt was on top I must have squished the water out as some was standing on top now. My side was full of mud, muddy pants and shirt. And to make matters worse the Bermuda was still in place.

Well I did get the Bermuda out and limping into the house with a sore back, hurt leg, foot, wrist and ego, changed, then sat down on the couch to do safer work. I put things up for sale on E-Bay.