A few months ago, my wife and I invested a good bit of money in having professionals come whip our front landscaping into shape. They did a great job. We’ve got all kinds of new flowers (don’t ask me what kind), new greenery, new mulch. The house has really benefitted from the colorful “facelift.” It looks pretty snazzy. We are thankful for our nice home, and enjoy it very much. We also didn’t want to be the eyesore of the neighborhood. But we finally admitted we were never going to get the motivation to attack the project ourselves. So we called in the pros – and are very pleased with our choice.
But now there are weeds. How did this happen?! I watched how deeply the husband and wife team dug up the old beds, cleared them out, and filled in fresh beautiful dirt. The flowers and plants they put in place were weed-free. So what happened? Did the weed fairy come visit our house and plant the nasty little green monsters while we slept? No, the reality of life is – weeds grow wherever there is dirt and water to be found. This has been a constant on planet earth since, well, the Garden of Eden. If I want to keep the ground around my home looking fresh and neat and well kept, I’ll have to either keep pulling weeds and trimming edges and cutting grass, or pay someone else to do it for me. (For what it’s worth, I’m opting to do it myself, because I think it helps reconnect me to the rhythm and order of God’s creation.)
So today I began pulling weeds. I donned my long sleeve gold Tigers shirt, clasped on the overalls, laced up my old pair of Timberlands, and dug my fingers into the moist, dark earth in front of my home. I was quickly faced with a very big decision, one I had not anticipated. What level of weeding was I going to perform? A quick scan of the sixty feet or so of flower/shrub beds indicated somewhere in the neigborhood of a dozen big, nasty, “devil weeds.” I don’t know what you call these things, but they are big and ugly and clearly love South Louisiana. And I was really tempted to just attack them and call the job done. But they were not alone. They had less obvious, but more sinister friends. Mid-level weeds that spread and hunker down. And don’t get me started on all the clover. And there was the grass from the yard that refuses to respect my boundaries. What should I do?!!
I decided I really wanted to get our money’s worth out of the recent landscape job, so I started at one end and began to remove all unwanted greenery (and a little brownery) from my path. Wow!!! What a job! This is a narrow strip of ground, and I really thought the whole project would take a half hour at most. When I reached the path from our front door (the halfway mark) an hour later, I decided to stop for the night and finish tomorrow. I may not have finished the weed pulling project yet, but I made some observations in the process that I believe are worth sharing:
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