The Great Garden Project 2006

If you REALLY want to see last year's project, click over there to either the September or October archives. The recap: Big, ugly, unruly plants were taking over, so I removed them, and found several herds of roaches and one black widow. These plants had a trunk at the bottom, the size of my ankle that I never could get fully removed.
I planned to either plant something new and pretty or at least get some big planters to stick out there full of flowers so that I wouldn't have to do any digging. That never happened.
This spring, we got motivated again and pulled up a ton of weeds, taking the "garden" back to its barren state which includes 2 different types of bushes that don't really coordinate (5 or 6 total) and one plant that is either a different bush that has grown much taller than it should, or a small tree. I have no clue what it is. Then we neglected the "garden." Lately, we noticed that it had turned into a jungle. Instead of 4 huge unruly plants taking over, we had 5 zillion types of weeds that had all moved in and made themselves at home. A midwife who came over for an interview informed us that one little patch of plants was actually wild lettuce which is a mild opiate. I want to know what the street value might be on wild lettuce!
In addition to the opiates, we had grass, clovers, dandelions, some ugly prickly things that you can't pull up without gloves, and a few other random weeds. We're about halfway done pulling all of these suckers up, and then we'll actually take that extra step and put down the layer of black weed-blocker stuff so that they can't regrow, and then toss all the mulch back on. Also, Michael got out some power tool thing and cut the ugly plants' roots down so that they are below the ground level now . Lastly, this year, I have no lofty plans of adding more plants. In the big barren space where the ugly plants and the black widow once lived, I'm putting the kids' picnic table. Maybe if we're still here next spring, I'll find the motivation to add flowers. For now though, I'm huge and pregnant and am doing good to pull plants up. Adding more plants in just isn't going to happen.