It's a Jungle Out There

This spring was not good to our backyard. The yard looked great, maybe a few weeds, and then it seemed like overnight it looked like a jungle. Seriously, it was scary. This picture just doesn't do it justice. We live on 1/3 of an acre and most of it is the backyard and it all looked like this.


Dallin wanted to just mow them all down, but I told him I wanted to pull them so they wouldn't come back. He laughed and told me it was a hopeless cause. I took that as a challenge and set to work pulling weeds. I would go out for about an hour every day and pull. Pulling weeds is normally therapeutic for me, but this was not fun. It ripped my fingers to shreds. And the yard is just so big - I would work and work and it wouldn't even make a dent.


As I pulled I would just make big mounds of the pulled weeds - after a couple of weeks I went out with trash bags to pick up the mounds and to my dismay, the areas I had pulled were already filling in with more weeds. AHHHHH!! I was very discouraged - and then I found a snake under one of the mounds of weeds and I was finished. Yes, I lost to the weeds and Dallin came out and mowed the lawn (or as Ella says, "sucked up all the weeds") put down some weed killer and for the most part they were gone.


During my weed pulling challenge, I found a competition on the DIY website. They were looking for the ugliest yard in America. I decided that we would enter and surely we would win a backyard make-over. The kids got really into this idea. I took lots of pictures and even a video of the kids telling why our yard was the ugliest and why we needed a new backyard. It was fun - but I never did it. I was going to surprise Dallin, but I told him beforehand and he laughed at my silly idea and now we'll never know if we really had the ugliest yard in America. It's really not all the bad minus the weeds. After all that weed pulling, however, my cuticles might just be the ugliest in America.