Dandelions have taken over my parking strip in front of the house. I mow and two days later the dandelions have grown six inches, and the lawn looks worse than before I mowed. So today I'm out there on my knees making bruises in my palms trying to dig dandelions from the dry, yes dry, hard clay that is our dirt here in northern Utah. Despite three days of cold rain, my lawn is bone dry because of all the shade trees. Shade is important when you don't have central air conditioning. Besides, I'd rather live in a forest, if I can't have ocean and beach, than a sunny expanse of lawn that must be watered and weeded constantly. I have refused to install a sprinkler system and water the old fashioned way, by hauling the hose around and setting the lawn-bird to get just what I'm aiming for. I have friends who spend half the summer repairing broken sprinkler heads due to running over them with a lawnmower. Fuck that I say. I'd rather keep just the trees and flower beds alive. And when the lawn has finally died, I'll Xerisscape the whole damn thing--nothing but shade loving Vinca major. Saves water and requires almost no care.
My only contact with the world of politics today is reading your comments and blogs. Oh, and I did watch Meet the Press, but can't remember a damn thing. Must be all those years of pot smoking. I can remember things from the long dead past, but not so much the short term. Which might explain why I'm having so much trouble learning how to Link.
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17 comments:
actually watering by hand already saves you watering costs. you only water when you need to, not on some sprinkler schedule. we are xeriscaped, no lawn, so are totally free from lawn slavery. if you don't mind chemicals, try "round-up" (sometimes sold as "kleen-up") in a little spray bottle on your dandelions. you can get it at Home Depot, etc. wait for non-rainy weather & aim the spray in a tight-pattern so it only hits the weed itself. don't water for a few days after. it will kill everything it touches, right down to the roots.
ps, about linking, in your blog compose mode, do you see a toolbar above the text area? It's a bar of little icons. If you do, linking will be easy. Find the one that looks like a green cockroach. Let me know if you've gotten that far & I'll lead you through the rest.
I just spent hours putting in plants and doing a bunch of containers. Mr. He Is is busy rototilling and getting the vegetable garden ready.
We are hose types here in upstate NY. Not too many sprinkler systems in these parts.
Our soil is hard and dry and strangely never what you would think it would be in a place that gets a decent amount of rain.
Go figure.
I think you are wise to water as you do and as for the dandelions, they are what they are.
I once had a fortune that said to love the weeds because they were simply flowers that could not be tamed.
I like that idea.
And I think it suits you!
d.K. darlin you are such a wonderful woman. I have gotten that far, but there is one little step prior to that linky cockroach and that is the http// etc, etc, that I have to copy and hang onto. That's the part I'm having trouble with. That and the opening a new tab. I never liked Tab, so a new tab hasn't sunk in yet--what's the tab for? is it a docking point where my info is placed for the moment? So confusing for my old chemically addled brain. I'm still arterially fibrillating like a mother and I have these points in the day when I just crash. I get that low blood-sugar feeling, start trembling and then it's nappy time, or pass-out time which ever happens first. I start the day in good shape, take my blood pressure, and my hand full of bipolar drugs, blood-pressure drugs and something new for the fibrillating. But about 2 p.m. I just crash. If I'm not close to my bed, I might have to crawl there or rest where I fall. I have these times when my blood-pressure drops terribly low, but my resting heart rate stays way too high, so I'm not really resting. At these times my brain is no longer operating very well. All of this has to be gone through to get my clotting factor just right so that they can do the next procedure--I think that's called an angioplasty. Don't know what they are planning to do with the hole in my heart. And the bills just keep on rolling in. If I keep talking about his I'll start dropping my big fat sorry for myself tears all over my keyboard. So, I'll stop typing, take the next handful of pills and have a little lie down and recover. When I get my wits about me, I'll try it again.
Fran darling, so good to see you. I love talking gardening with you sensible women. Fran I'm so glad you have come visiting. I have admired your comments everywhere I saw them and envied the recipient a little. Maybe envy is one of my sin. But now, when you are visiting me, and now I'm crying again, just because I'm so glad to see you. The old get so fucking sentimental. Hardly goes with my savage image.
UT, if you've got those icons, you've got it made! Listen, I'm doing yardwork today myself. You go lay down & take it easy. Later tonight I'll leave you a comment. You are only a few steps away from linking! one quick question, you are talking about linking in your blog text, right? not embedding a video in your blog post, or linking in a comment? none of this is intuitive to me either. I am a complete computer nincompoop, so if I can do it, you can too. I don't even bother learning WHY something works, I just do it like a robot, without any understanding.
Anti-savage is all the new savage don't you know... Some rage, some tears. It is good, it works for you.
Listen sister girl, you got me on a roll... Your two comments proved to be so thought provoking that I am giving them their own post in response.
What did ever take my sorry ass so long to get to this blog????
You want to see rage? You would have to watch me working on those damn sprinkler heads in my yard that totally screw up an usually end up watering more of the street than my yard. Now that the rain has stopped, for the most part, until the fall I'll be playing catch up trying not to have brown patches in my yard. I wouldn't care if Dragonwife didn't bug the the daylights out of me about it. Been staying from politics after I heard Hillary's assassination comment the other day. That one went light years over the line.
To get rid of dandelions try getting one of those Garden Claw things - I think the Garden Weasel people make them. I just got one and it works great to dig out weeds.
If that fails, DK's suggestion of Round-Up is the foolproof solution!
greetings, utah -- just dropped in to read your fab posts and I have to say that I love your new look....maybe one day I'll get back to blogging, but for right now I've hung it up.
To link a website: google whatever website you want to link & right click on the http address (up in the google search area). This will highlight the http address. A drop-down menu will appear. Left click on “Copy”.
Now start a new blog post, or call up one you are working on. When you reach the word or phrase in your text that you want to link to this website, double left click that word/phrase. It will now be highlighted.
Next left click on the green cockroach icon in your blogger compose toolbar. A little box will pop up. The second line already has http:// highlighted. Hit the “delete” key on your keyboard to get rid of it.
Now place your mouse cursor into that box where you just deleted http, and right click. Left click on “Paste” in the drop-down menu. The whole http address from the website you selected will appear. Then left click the “OK” button.
That’s it. You’re done! The word/phrase you selected has been linked to whatever website you copied.
Place your cursor back into the post you are composing & keep typing text to finish it.
If you have a lot of links to do in one post, try googling them all, one after the other, and minimizing each one as you go. Then as you reach the text word in your blog that you want to link, minimize your blog while you restore the particular website you’re trying to link. From that point on, it is the same instructions. By minimizing them all at once, you can work through them one at a time. As you finish linking each website, just close it, don’t re-minimize it.
OK, that's the easy way when you're trying to link to a specific website. There's lots of other kinds of links, partial links, selected text copy links. But you should practice this kind first until you're comfortable with it. Next you can work on "Images" which you should also see in your blogger toolbar icons. That one will allow you to post photos or web images.
Dandelions allow me to say I have a lawn.:)
Hi.
I don't really know what I want to say to you, but after reading this post I knew you were someone I wanted to know.
Maybe in a few hours my brain will start functioning again. It does that. Just quits...never warns me.....
I never water the lawn. If the sun hangs overhead for weeks on end, then I say, let the browning begin. Less to cut.
The dandelions do indeed grow like fungi on steroids, but I don't feel like pulling them out all the time, and I'm against tossing chemicals all over the place.
I never want to be the dude that edges his lawn twice a week, cuts it three and spends all his disposable income on making it extra green. Fuck man, just buy a fucking case of green spray paint.
I suppose I should go pull the weeds out of the cracks in the driveway, but hey, there's slacking to be done.
Call for participation: Recipes for Peace
cheers
Naj
I am a big supporter of the concept of Kill Your Lawn. That is mainly directed toward drought-sensitive areas like yours and mine. If you live in an area with plenty of water available, then water-sucking plants are fine.
Whatever grass is leftover from the previous occupants here is not watered, and there's very little of it left. MrB has xeriscaped it all, and has even won an award from the city for doing just that. People say the yard is beautiful - full of cactus, wildflowers, gravel.
We pull grass and plant weeds, that's what I like to say. (weeds = wildflowers)
We live over an aquifer so it's a really bad idea to poison everything with chemicals. It should be (and I wish it was) illegal to do that, but it isn't.
I always liked dandelions and never understood why people try to eradicate them.
I agree with Blueberry. Haven't had a lawn since 1992. Giving away our lawnmower was a high point of that year. No more lawn slavery. Xeriscaping is beautiful & native plants are so much easier to take care of.
Randal will appreciate, I tried green-colored gravel for awhile. But it looked like something out of the exorcist. Who needs to immitate lawn? Like Geo Carlin, I think Golf Courses should be converted into community vegetable/fruit gardens.
I don't like poison either, but I have to admit I do occasionally use round-up on russian thistle. Otherwise, it has to be pulled out with a winch. Same with tamarisk, another non-native wildfire accelerant.
Years of smoking cannabis don't hurt ya!
They lie about that ya know ;)
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