Cleaning up our Wild Yard

Hello hello! This past weekend I finally got out in our yard and made a small dent in cleaning out some of the weeds. When we first purchased the house, the yard was probably the most wild yard I’ve ever witnessed, I kid you not! I wish I had taken a picture because the entire yard was covered in weeds that were as tall as I am (and I’m 5’8″)!

It was so bad that when the homeowner’s association came by to do their 30 day post-closing inspection, they informed us that unless we got the yard under control they would be dropping our policy.

At that point we were so busy with the interior renovations, that we just cut all the weeds down and called it good until we could focus on it this summer. So I’m taking a little break from indoor projects so that I can start creating our dream yard.

The first step was weed removal. It’s crazy how quickly these things pop up! A couple of weeks ago we just had a bunch of dirt and all of the sudden the weeds started appearing again overnight.

For some reason these tall dainty ones with yellow buds really creeped me out. Probably because these really did seem to grow overnight. And they were tall!

We have a really neat raised flower bed along the back fence, but it’s currently filled with a lot of these lilly pad looking things (sorry I’m not technical with my weed names!). I’ve seen these before but never this big–I don’t think this picture really does their size justice.

And it’s pretty bad when you have grass growing in your rocks, but it’s even worse when you’re starting to lose your chairs.

That was actually the most rewarding spot that I cleared. Here’s a look after I was done with that area.

Since we had gotten a lot of rain last week, the ground was moist enough that most everything just yanked right out of the ground, which was really nice.

You can see that I got most of the tall suckers out. I still need to work on clearing the raised flower bed out. I have big plans for this area!

Our next step is to till the ground (either rent a tiller or just use a shovel since it’s a small yard) and get some grass seed down. But before doing that, I wanted to try to kill off some of the smaller weeds that I didn’t get to.

I read a tip online about using vinegar as a weed killer. If you add a couple of squirts of dish soap, it helps it stick better to the weeds. And if you add salt, it helps prevent anything from growing in that soil again. But that means, anything. So it’s important that you don’t add salt if you are spraying in an area that you plan to plant or grow grass.

I went around the soon to be grassy area and the flower bed and sprayed the vinegar and dish soap mixture. Once I was done, I refilled my spray bottle and added about a quarter cup of salt to spray in the rock area.

I like that this was cheap and I also don’t have to worry about my babies (furry and human) playing in the yard.

I wish I could report back how effective it was, but unfortunately it started raining later that day, and 3 days later it still hasn’t stopped. So I’m pretty sure it just washed right off. Maybe it will still work, we’ll see!

I wanted to get the grass seed down this weekend, but we are supposed to have rain the rest of the week, including the weekend. Womp womp.

Oh well, if I can’t get out in the yard at least it forces me to clean the garage.

Have a happy week everyone!

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