Blank Slate Backyard

We have a good-sized, mostly flat backyard, but with renters living in this property for the past several years, it's been neglected.  There's a gully in the back filled with leaves and rotting trees, shrubs and vines gone-wild, and the only thriving grass--monkey grass--took over a primo spot in the center of the yard.

Monkey grass is used as a hardy ground cover in the south, but it spreads like wildfire, breeds mosquitoes, and I don't want to worry about Copperhead snakes hiding in it.  So, when we moved in, I created a listing on Craigslist for free monkey grass if people wanted to dig and haul it away themselves.  It's a great way to recycle unwanted plants and it saves us the back-breaking manual labor of digging it up ourselves.

I thought we'd have enough for a few people, but I ended up having about 15 different people come by and leave with car/truck loads full of monkey grass.  It was never ending!  There are still some root systems that will continue to produce the pesky grass in our yard but hopefully clearing out the bulk of it will make it more manageable.

From past experience, it seems to take about a year to get a yard cleared out and uncover the blank slate we have to work with.

 (Monkey grass and "Jabba the Hutt" bush on the back fence gone. More open space for Maya to run!)

For some reason, we have the most trees on our lot out of any of the homes around us (front and back).  We plan to hire someone to chop down a few of the tall dead ones, but in the meantime, we're clearing out shrubs, vines, branches, and smaller trees with nothing but a pair of branch cutters and a hand saw.

Apparently Tommie is all about multitasking--here he is up in a tree, saw in one hand, cell phone in the other discussing grants with his boss.  Don't try this at home, kids.

As for taming the weeds, ivy, and vines, I didn't want to use any harsh chemicals with our dog (or with us, for that matter) so I found a recipe online for a natural plant killer (white vinegar, salt, and a little dish soap).  I found that if I sprayed it on a warm sunny day, the leaves soaked up the vinegar and withered away.  It's not fool-proof but it does make the plants retreat, and therefore, easier to clear out.

(Above are the weeds and vines before, then browning below about a week after spraying salt and vinegar on them.)

(A few weeks later, we cleared out the withering vines, so the fence is clean and invasive plants aren't spilling over into our yard.)

We learned that it's important to keep the vines at bay or else they overtake the trees.  Some of the pricker bushes invading our yard from neighbors' had to have reached 50 feet up some of our trees--it was like Jack and the Beanstalk.  Below is Tommie fighting against the vortex.

Long-term, I envision a beautiful, multi-section yard/garden with a grassy area for Maya, a play area for the swing set we inherited, a game strip for Tommie's corn hole, a garden for me, a patio with a fire pit, and a screened-in porch.  For now, we're just clearing out, trying to get a blank slate to work with.