Too Much of a Good Thing

Before the nitrogen fertilizer.

They say the best defense is a good offense.  Why do "they" always have all the answers?  I spent days offensing offensively with my best offense.  In real terms, I dug up the whole front bed that cuddled the horsetail.   Then squeezed a few chicken amendments into it along with lots of ammonium sulfate.

One day after application

See the results of too much of a good thing.

Roots of the not-preferred plant were dug out.
 Area received a heavy dose of nitrogen fertilizer.
It will be easy to take care of any growth that springs up.

I'm thrilled and my heart sings through the Things I get to do today.  The digging, the sifting for threads of roots, the redoing of my iris bed and the area around my rose--it's all just play, because I'm using sweetness and goodness to outwit and outpower something that I prefer not to have. Simple as that.

The Lie and The Truth

"Tiffany" Rose whose fragrance is beyond the beauty
of the flower itself.  This is for the "blog world."

We bloggers lie.  Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help your garden spade?  Well. . .ah, sure, a-huh.  Yep.  But with our camera's we show only what we want the world to see--of ourselves and of our gardens.  There's nothing right or wrong about this; there's just more than what meets the eye of the reader.

Here's the real picture.  My lovely rose bush surrounded
by invasive "horsetail"

While the Things I get to do today take me to abject despair and then from this dark place back to hope again, I thought I would air the dirty laundry, show you what's in the closet, but really just add a picture of part of my front yard.

Where is that lovely rose now?  Hint--top left.
 This is my view without the editing help of the camera.

Since life is just an experiment--that word has been included two or three times a week lately--my despair over the horsetail that is taking over my front yard has moved from the depths back to a place of hope. One of the on-line sources commented that none of the weed killers on the market (and I won't use them anyway) will really stop horsetail, but that it thrives in poor soil. Nitrogen rich soil is toxic to it.  I brightened immediately as I heard my mother caution me about using chicken "litter" in the garden,  "Be careful.  It will burn the plants!"  Wow! So I could pull/dig the horsetail and seriously amend the soil with chicken poo and eventually stop the horsetail.

Gravel path green with newly sprouted horsetail.
It was all clean last week.

A vision of my pull up the bushy, tufted weed and then immediately holding a chicken over the spot and squeezing it until the soil was "amended" plopped into my mind.

Wish me well with this experiment.