Fighting a Losing Battle

Our backyard garden* is kind of like an aging starlet: from just the right angle, in just the right light, and with the rose-coloured lenses of wishful thinking, it looks quite lovely.

Lush, green gardens.

But, if you get closer, or change your perspective, the ravages of time and Mother Nature are more apparent.

Also lush and green, but not in a good way.

Before I left on my trip to Georgia, this patch was a little weedy, but not this bad! Ten days away and entropy** has taken over. In some of the garden areas, the weeds aren't too, too bad, but in others ...

I know where the "plant" is,
but I wouldn't trust my kids to know the difference.

I tried to do some damage control, but didn't really achieve much more than ruining my manicure (such as it is).

I'm trying - again - to grow my nails.
Gardening is not a good activity for that.

I really have to just get out there with a shovel and a hoe and get rid of the intruders once and for all, then put down some mulch before the weeds take hold again. I wish I could just have the fun part of gardening (the pretty trees, flowers and shrubs) and not have to worry about the work part of it.

---

* The "backyard" vs. "back yard" thing has been bugging me for a while, so I finally looked it up. Here is a concise explanation, which suddenly seems so obvious to me. I may have to go through all of my posts about the back yard and make corrections.

The thing itself is a two-word phrase: you grow vegetables in your back yard. The adjective form that describes the location of something behind your house is a single word: you have a backyard vegetable garden. - Source

** I have always defined entropy as "the tendency of things to revert to their most chaotic condition." Wikipedia has much more to say on the subject, which seriously undermined my confidence in my interpretation. My resident engineering physicist, however, assures me that I've got it right. Take that, Wikipedia!