Yard work in winter - YUK!

[Marilyn]

Hubby wants to work on our front flower beds this month. I have to admit, the plants have overgrown the beds, but he wants to remove them all, put them in pots, till up the dirt and steralize it to kill all the weed and grass remnants and seeds, and separate the plants to make them smaller again and replant. Sounds like a LOT OF WORK to me.

I want to landscape the back yard, since we are on a golf course, lots of folks have their back yards landscaped like their fronts. We don't need something elaborate, but simple would look much better than what we have now which is nothing.

Rather than buy new plants to do the backyard, I want to salvage the overgrowth from the front yard and use it to start the beds. Hubby is a buy it new at the nursery kind of guy, but I think his pocketbook will allow him to consider the option I'm proposing once we get into it.

Just hate the time this is going to take. UHHHHH!!

[Janet]

At 70 degrees I would love to be out working in the yard. I didn't get anything at all done to our yard this past summer. No flowers...nothing. This year I'm hoping to get a little bit done. It's so expensive. I mostly want my flower beds redone, won't take much really, but they need improved upon.

What is this stuff that sterilizes and gets rid of all the weeds..seeds..etc. ? Does it keep weeds from growing back in with the flowers? I would love something like that so I don't have to pull as many weeds...especially when it really gets hot and humid.

[DianaB]

I couldn't imagine doing yard work this time of year! This month is the time that I try to do what "I" want to do. I want to scrapbook but at the moment we're too busy and we're expecting company in the near future.

[gja1000]

I'm not sure what "sterilizing" Marilyn is talking about - but I "sterilized" year before last by taking all my plants out of my front bed in the beginning of the summer. Then I covered the bed with black plastic so when it got really hot, the seeds/stuff "cooked" over the summer. Yes, our front yard looked sorta like the "Clampets" but we don't live in a fussy neighborhood, so it was OK

This method is called solarizing and is a safe way to kill weeds/seeds. If you want to plant again in the same spot, you really can't use any kind of chemicals. Plus, I'm a "green grower" and don't use any kind of chemicals at all in my yard. We put in a rock bed, rather than flowers, so that we don't have to use extra water to keep them alive.

I want to put in a 12X5 garden in my back yard. I don't get tons of sunlight, but I think I could grow a few vegetables. We will have to put in a raised bed - using landscape timbers and then have garden soil hauled in. We only have about 3-4" of soil in our back yard and then it is caliche (sp) rock. I'll probably get the guys that did our yardwork this fall to do it, either in late Jan or early Feb.

[Tiramisu]

It's warm and HUMID here. We pulled all the overgrown shrubs out of our front flowerbeds at the first of August and I planted yellow daffodils that were my Mom's favorite. I have mulch on my shopping list, but haven't borrowed the truck of go get it. So, I was out pulling weeds a couple days ago. We have one more huge Sago Palm to transplant and I'm planting a 12' Northern Pine there in the Spring.

[Marilyn]

Well, I mentioned it in another thread, but we removed our Christmas lights from the yard this morning & hubby got carried away and we also trimmed the trees and the crepe myrtles and hauled all the brush to the county brush site along with the Christmas tree. I just hope I'm not sunburned. My skin feels a little warm, so I may have gotten a bit too much sun.

His next outdoor project will be the flower beds, and yes, we will look like the Clampets for a while, too, just hope the neighbors don't complain too much.

We don't know what the sterilizer is that hubby uses, but it's some kind of pellets. It is tilled into the soil and the soil is left for 30 to 45 days before you can plant anything in it.

He did this when we built our home 5 years ago, and we have had very little problem with weeds or grasses in the beds. The weeds we do have are now increasing in quantity, so this is why he thinks it's time to sterilize again. After it's done, all he will have to do is hit any little bits of weed or grass with a squirt of Roundup. No heavy weeding needs to be done. It's really nice. We don't eat anything grown in the sterilized soil, it's for decorative shrubs only, and they grow very well in the soil after this is done. I kinda think the sterilizer may be a super fertilizer that burns the weeds and grasses to death & discipates enough to plant things in it over the 30 days or so. All the shrubs looked really nice and actually grew larger than some of them were supposed to. This may be why our beds are so overgrown.

[Janet]

Well with all this outdoor talk I'm ready to get started, but we are headed down to the teens within the next couple of days. Guess I'd better get all the inside stuff done so when it does warm up...I can be outside.