Yard Day 1: Not much to see yet.

I began the much-anticipated yard renovation in earnest today, although the work had really started two weeks ago. Beginning the day before Earth Day, I applied a total of about two and a half coats of Roundup to the yard. Roundup is a glyphosate herbicide, which is 'non-selective'—meaning it's napalm for plants. Here's what my yard looked like after the damage was done:

More after the jump.

The times, they are a-changin'

Soon, this will be an all-too-common sight.

We're in the process of getting the nursery ready, and part of that involves washing EVERYTHING. Katie's kicking butt at laundry so far!

Egypt: YOU'RE DOING IT WRONG.

GENEVA - The World Health Organization announced Thursday it will would stop using the term "swine flu" to avoid confusion over the danger posed by pigs. The policy shift came a day after Egypt began slaughtering thousands of pigs in a misguided effort to prevent swine flu.

AP article

P.S. I felt weird tagging this "lol," but I didn't exactly know what else to do.

The Origin of Swine Flu

I originally got this in an email from Gerardo, but I'm morally opposed to forwards—and besides, that's exactly what blogs are for!

[source unknown]

courtesy of xkcd

No Turning Back Now

It's go time.

  

This is about what the yard looked like when we moved into the house a little over a year ago. occasional patches of St. Augustine grass scattered amongst large patches of thick, dead thatch. Weeds everywhere. Occasional dirt patches. More dead grass. And more weeds. Most of it looked like this:

I tried to do what watering I could that first summer, but we spent a solid half of it out of town while the Austin area was going through a pretty severe drought. And with no sprinkler system, my yard didn't get nearly as much water as it needed.

So why "no turning back?" About two hours ago, I put about 5 (diluted) gallons of RoundUp on the yard. And only 18-ish hours before Earth Day! Most of our yard will be completely dead in the next 12 hours or so, and all of it should be dead in 3 or 4 days.

Two weeks from tomorrow I'm going to renovate the entire front yard. That includes fixing and bordering our flower beds, which currently look like this:

As well as re-mulching and bordering our two trees, one of which currently looks like this:

Needless to say, I'll have my work cut out for me—but the result will (hopefully) be a sexy Bermudagrass lawn that's a lot more drought tolerant and a lot less dead. I'll post updates as I do interesting stuff. Wish me luck and stay tuned!

YES! thank u. as a fellow writer who doesn't really write, i notice that kind of thing. i also notice that he's unintentionally (it seems) grammatically incorrect and it bugs me.

Anonymous commenter on a blog I won't call out by name