Aimless Tangents

I’m kicking myself a bit over here.

I started with a corner bed left from the previous homeowners.  The wood was infested with ants and we have been wanting to pull it out for a year or two.  Finally pulled all the wood out a few weeks ago.  Decision was made to till up the dirt and use it to fill in along the back fence since it was sorta low and plant my garden there. 

Rains came and we had to ignore the bed for a while.  But while we were tearing the wood out i noticed some really weird looking roots and things.  But figured it was just left over stuff.  While we waited for things to dry out, the "grass" took over and it looked like this:

I started on it with a hoe last week and then got side tracked by redoing the porch roof, using the borrowed wood chipper to get rid of a pile of stuff, and recovering from one of the worst sun burns of my life.  Yesterday and today Hubs and I have been after it with our electric tiller.  We’ve made progress and I’ve decided that the husband was right, I do have more dirt than I know what to do with. 

This is how much I’ve got left, and most of the low spots have been filled at this point. 

Today, after tilling up that weird looking grass and spreading the dirt along the fence for my new garden area I decided to finally look up what the grass was.  Quackgrass.  First word of advice on the pages I looked at:  Don’t till it!!!!  Apparently it can come back from all the roots and rhizomes.  Oh, goody.

From here the plan is going to be to put down several layers of newspaper, then mulch on top of that.  I’ll cut holes in the newspaper to plant my garden through.  Whatever Quackgrass pokes through will get pulled by hand.  At this point it is far too late to go and dig through and try to remove each and every single piece of root and rhizome. 

But man, is it looking better already.

For now I’ve stopped about where the tiller is sitting.  The corner currently has some junk sitting in it from a pile of twigs/leaves that needs to be cleaned out. 

The big thing I was pushing for was getting enough room to plant the zucchini and tomato seedlings I have.  It is supposed to rain tonight and tomorrow and who knows how long it will take for the yard to be ready to work in again.