For years, we’ve had ground cover in our front beds. It was some kind of leafy, viney plant that produced little blue flowers during the spring. It kept the beds covered, looked reasonably good, and — most important of all — was virtually maintenance-free and imposed no significant weeding duties.
Several years ago, however, some grass invaded one of the beds. It was a gradual invasion at first, and I thought it could be controlled by pulling the grass plants out of the beds. But I was wrong. Grass plants apparently establish some kind of intricate below-ground network of roots. Once grass plants get established, it’s virtually impossible to pull them out one by one, because the roots remain and new blades of grass just grow out. And it was impossible to identify all of the growing grass, because the shorter, newer blades were hidden by the ground cover. As a result, my weeding efforts were doomed to failure, and there was no viable alternative. We couldn’t spray the grass with some kind of powerful herbicide because the grass was mixed with the ground cover, and spraying would just kill the ground cover.
So, despite my best efforts, with each passing year the encroachment got worse and worse. This year, the beds were totally overgrown with tall grass, making the house look like it had been abandoned. Because there was no other choice, we finally exercised the nuclear option and decided to strip out all of the plants in the beds, grass and ground cover included. We had it done today, and I think our neighbors were appreciative. When I went out to look at the work tonight, our neighbor across the way gave me a thumbs-up and said “looking good!”
Pretty embarrassing.
