I Know for Whom the Grass Quacks

This last December, we became homeowners for the first time. This meant that I had to start learning those skills that homeowners require, such as learning how to avoid yard work. Thus far I have been found to be pretty adept at this, but when my lovely wife, who has taken interest in our plant friends outside and thus been doing the yard work I've been trying so hard to avoid, came home with a note from the doctor saying she couldn't be out in the sun, I knew I had been bested. As a result, I found myself outside last weekend attempting to remove the latest scourge from our yard; the dread quack grass.

For those unfamiliar with quack grass, it is like crab grass's meaner big brother. According to my wife's research, it spreads faster that internet videos of heiresses in night vision (or the heiresses themselves, for that matter). Judging from our yard, this would appear to be an accurate assessment.

The problem is that in order to kill this stuff, you have to kill all of the grass around it as well. She tried to take a targeted swipe at it first, which led to patches of my lawn which is now brown and dead. Well, not entirely dead. There's still some quack grass growing there.

I took a more vicious approach myself. Given that I already have to dig up these portions of the lawn and reseed them, I took to carpet bombing. It didn't help that I was working as the sun set, so the darker it got, the more everything that moved looked like quack grass. I'm almost afraid of seeing the actual results. I'm thinkng half of my yard is going to be brown by Saturday. At least I think the quack grass will be dead.

This lead me to notice something: my neighborhood is quiet. I don't mean as in "a nice, quiet neighborhood" quiet. I mean as in dead silent quiet sometimes. It's weird. The reason I bring this up is, well, while I was out trying to establish my dominance over the grass situation, I had a familiar rumbling in my gut, and as Bob is my witness, I was afraid to unleash the spider that barks for fear of being the only sound in a three block radius. All could think of was the open windows. As a direct result of this unearthly quiet, I had to finish the job of decimating my lawn while trying to ignore a belly ache and hoping that no one overhead the inevitable squeaking as I occasionally gave up the battle.

Now that it has actually cause me physical suffering, all I can say is that the quack grass better be dead. The only plan I have left is to kill it with fire. I wonder what the home owner's association has to say about slash and burn gardening.

On the bright side, I might still get to invest in that flamethrower. Groovy.