If You Want Something Done Right . . .

Gardening is one endeavor that gives truth to the adage, If you want something done right, you should do it yourself. Last spring, we doubled the length of the rose bed in the front yard, from about ten feet to twenty feet. Time, however, got away from me, and I neglected to weed and mulch the new bed after we put in Kay's additional roses. By August, when the bed finally seized my lapels and demanded my attention, the space between the roses was like a vacant lot. Hard as concrete and veined with Bermuda grass, clover, portulaca, maple seedlings, dandelions, plantain, and who knows what else. Every evening for over a week, I then spent two hours with a hand spade digging out each weed, cum roots if possible, and then blanketing the day's recovered area with mulch.

Our rose bed in the back yard really needed the same treatment. But by the time I was done with the front bed, I just could not face the same job with the even longer back bed. So we hired someone to weed it for us. The woman we hired is a fine garden designer (she laid out the perennial bed along the front of the house) but not such a great weeder. I think what she did was essentially hoe off the tops of the weeds and then mulch.

Now it's the following season, and the difference between my hand weeding in the front and the weeding-for-hire in the back is apparent. The front bed (which I freshened up yesterday) had just a handful of weeds. The back bed, meanwhile, has a green mat of clover, tufts of grass, and a weed I haven't identified yet but is common in our yard. I need to do to the back rose bed what I did last year in the front: laborious hand weeding, inch by inch, until the bed is clear.