Our Even More Dead Yard

Absolutely #1 on the list of re-doing our front yard is NO GRASS. Currently there is "grass" but it's not attractive at all (because we don't tend to it)

I'm not sure if our front yard can be qualified as green, but there are still bits of green that need to be killed.

Wendy and I looked through many articles and talked to a few nurseries about how to best kill the rest of the grass so that our front yard would be completely barren and ready for planting. Ultimately we decided to use Round Up. There were a variety of reasons, but the top ones were that it was a fast process and it killed things from the root. I found this article especially helpful, though I modified things a bit (mostly out of laziness and poor planning).

Here's what our weeds looked like to start


Per the instructions I gave the yard a good water

You're supposed to wait a full day before you do the first spray of Round Up, but it was really hot that day so I did it the same day. I bought a bottle of concentrate for $20 and mixed it in a spray bottle

Then I sprayed THE ENTIRE YARD. This sucked. Our yard isn't even very big and it took me nearly and hour and a half crouched over spraying all those blades of grass, man eating weeds and dandelions. And at the end my forearms were very tired from squeezing that damn spray bottle.

It's important to spray your yard when it's warm outside and spray in the beginning of the day so it has the full day to bake in the sunshine and heat. Though I did it in the middle of the day and it still worked out fine.

I sprayed the yard two Wednesdays ago and per the instructions I gave it two days to work it's magic. On that same Friday the weeds were looking like this



That Friday morning I sprayed round two. This time I spent another $20 and bought the pre-mixed spray container

While this went A LOT faster because its spray was wider than the spray bottle, it didn't cover as much area. I only used 1/3 of the concentrate bottle during round one, and the pre-mix only covered about 1/2 of the yard. While it's a lot more convenient, it costs a lot more. So I finished round two with the concentrate I'd already purchased.

Here's what it looked like after round 2 and after I'd put the stakes in our yard to flag it off for utilities to know where we'd be landscaping to mark for pipes in the yard

And here it is a day later

Again, I waited two days till round three when I sprayed anything left that was green (that same Sunday).

Just a reminder, here's where we started

And now, here's our front yard after it's been sprayed with Round Up three times and been baking in the sun for about 10 days

DEAD





I'm so excited to see everything dead. I know that's a strange thing to read because normally we want front yards to be lush and beautiful, but we gotta kill the yard before we replant it.

What's up next? This weekend we're hoping to get all the dead grass ripped out and because the Round Up has killed it from the roots we're hoping that it has a harder time growing back. Not to mention we've looked into all different kinds of weed block. We've also got to dig and build a couple french drains because we're not super thrilled with how the roofers planned out our gutters (and didn't talk to us about it before they installed them, just another reason we hate Westco/Berkeley Roof Services) and we also don't have great drainage against the house. Hopefully next week we'll have great progress to share!