Slowly terraforming the backyard into a chaotic mass of native plants

[napoleonherself]

Eugh, the UI for Livejournal went all-caps since the last time I noticed it. At least now the image uploader works again. That's actually what stopped me posting several times in the last few months, is not being able to upload the images that I wanted to share.

ANYWAY! Have some pictures from four-day-weekend garden-a-thon that we did this weekend. (I took Monday and Tuesday off from work.)

Sic semper garlic mustard:


Both of those bags are full of garlic mustard. Half of it isn't even from our yard, it's from three different neighbor yards, but nobody else around here bothers to pull garlic mustard and since it's a horrible invasive if you let one plant go to seed then you have 500 plants the next year so it spreadddssss. And it displaces basically all other plants, so where it grows, nothing else does. Entire forest/woodland areas have had their normal understory plants wiped out by garlic mustard. Please, if you live in North America and have any sort of lawn/garden thing, get to know garlic mustard and make sure you don't have any. And if you do, get rid of it. It pulls real easy most of the time, and it's only a biannual so if you mow its tall second-year form BEFORE IT FLOWERS SERIOUSLY ONLY BEFORE, then it won't come back the next year. And it really does smell like garlic when crushed, so it's easy to ID that way until you reach the point where you recognize its sinister appearance on sight.

I really hate garlic mustard.

Sic sometimes honeysuckle:




Before and after. Mecha machete'd out some of the invasive honeysuckle that's busily escaping cultivation at the back of our property, and then we planted a native nannyberry. One of the cut vines kept spewing sap for ages afterwards. It was really creepy.

We also planted five other trees/shrubs plus a couple of phloxes, plus there are other backyard shenanigans, but this is what I'm posting so far.

Comments

[ryl.livejournal.com]

I get the impression you don't like garlic mustard.

You have to watch your phlox. They tend to wander.

[napoleonherself.livejournal.com]

GARLIC MUSTAAAARD.

Right now the phlox is in an area that's an island of garden in a sea of boring grass, so technically if they wandered then they would be doing us a favor. I'll keep an eye on them, though... there's always the option of digging them up like I keep having to do with the oxeye daisies that have rhizomed over from the neighbor's yard.

[ryl.livejournal.com]

Don't you love rhizomes? They're the annoying guy at the yard party, always showing up uninvited and right where you don't want them. Maybe those marigold-eating slugs I've got will take care of them.