the evil that is bermuda grass

We've been trying to figure out a way to get rid of the Bermuda grass growing where we want to build our raised beds that doesn't involve copious quantities of Round-Up for almost a month. I've tried tilling the grass and pulling it out by hand, covering it with a tarp to cut off sun and water and double digging and burying the grass. According to the internet gods of gardening, none of this will stop the Bermuda grass from rising up like Godzilla in the middle of our vegetables. You literally have to get every single blade and root pulled out because even one tiny piece is enough to regenerate roots and runner and return with a a vengeance. Reading what works for others will only get you so far, today it was time to take action.


push it real good

We rented a sod-cutter and hoped the rain had softened the dirt enough to take at least 3 inches off the top of the dead grass. I pushed the sod-cutter and April followed behind with a pitchfork to pry up the sod, we thought it would roll up neatly like the instructional videos had shown us but Bermuda grass don't play like that. The long straight swaths were not too bad to plow but trying to run that machine up or down an incline was next to impossible. Once the mud had covered the steam-roller like wheel in front of the sod buster, all traction was lost and I could not get the supposedly "self-propelled" machine to go anywhere especially uphill. I hit the kill switch and picked up a shovel to help April load the sod into a wheel barrow and started thinking about how good a frozen yogurt would be right about then. The rain would fall hard, quit for a few minutes and start up even harder, we became damper and colder and muddier as the project wore on. The prospect of TCBY drove us on like a delicious frozen temptress. We finally called it once we had met the minimum rental requirements since it was clear we had done everything we could do with the sod-cutter. The fro-yo was delicious.


mmmn...chocolate pumpkin hot fudge sundae and mountain blackberry small cup

We've also been having a great debate on whether the railroad ties we bought to build the beds out of are too soaked with creosote (coal tar) to grow vegetables we will be selling and eating. Since we had dropped $12 per railroad tie and made two trips to Lowe's amassing a pile of 16 of those 100lb+ monsters; I was in favor of using them. April with her fancy Stanford education in health science thought the risk of cancer might warrant the consideration of an alternative. I may be cheap but I'm not stupid. I finally realized that the area the raised beds will be in sits right over our only water supply, the well. If there is even a small possibility of that creosote leaching down into the aquifer after years of rain and snow, it makes sense to get some cinder blocks and figure out something else to do with the railroad ties. April won the debate and we'll be headed back to Lowe's manana, fortunately she has a birthday gift card she has been hiding from me. That will at least take some of the sting out of it...

One last thing, I found some free shit on Craigslist. Literally. On Thursday, the dogs and I drove 45 miles out to Catawba, NC to a horse farm to fill my pickup bed with FREE already composting horse manure. I brought a bottle of Spanish wine as a thank you for the poo, the lady who owned the farm with her husband was super-nice. She came out to check on me as I shoveled the steamy dung in the rain and brought me a bottle of water. It was hard for her to understand how anyone could be so happy under those circumstances so I told her I was sure the novelty would eventually wear off. But it never did, I overloaded my Chevy until it looked like something from a rap video. The drive home was interesting as I was coated in wet horse crap and the tarps I had covered my payload with were not as well secured as I had thought. I started to smell something like burning transmission fluid which made me pull over to investigate, it was actually the tarp which had loosened enough to be dragging behind the truck and had melted into a shredded mess from the friction. Happy I had not killed my truck with too much poop, we made it home safely driving at granny speed down the windy foothill roads. After I finished adding the new stuff to my pile, it is now as tall as I am. I will be making many more trips to the horse farm to get as much of the good shit as I can.


soggy supervisors