Yards are for Tards

I admit it. I'm a failure as a gardener.

I tried. Kind of. The idea is pretty: moving along through a well-manicured yard, clipping something here, watering something there. But it just doesn't work that way.

Besides my own general slothfulness, indifference and incompetence, there is the question of the climate. Things grow here in Seattle. All of the time. Among those things are blackberries, which are hateful plants that snag at your legs and cut your hands to ribbons, even with gloves on. You can clip a blackberry bush off at the ground, spritz it with round-up (yes, I know, it's a horrible poison, but this is a matter of life and death here) and I swear it will come back.

Then there is English Ivy. Sometime in the past some joker thought it would be funny to transplant the little English Ivy they got while in the hospital or something. The Ivy looked around and said "Hey! I like this!" and ZOWEE -we have English Ivy literally on everything not moving here in the Northwest. It's even worse than moss, which is another thing that creeps up on you. (Just ask my roof)

As if this weren't enough, we have a lot of feral cats in my neighborhood, and they like to use the yard as their bathroom (I'm pretty sure Sputnik has a hand in this). So even if I wanted to potter in the garden I'd have to look out for their landmines. It makes mowing day a real joy.

The solution is to pave over as much of the yard as possible, and I've actually done that in the backyard, where it hardly ever gets any sun anyway, and I am thinking of doing it in my side yard, which is long and narrow and basically just a path to the backyard, but I can't bring myself to do that in the front yard, as that is just TOO Beacon Hill (the Seattle version at least)

So I'm stuck. Stuck with an uninspired front yard that has more than its share of cat poop. It's a bitter pill to swallow, that I will never be one of those "gardening people", but I suppose that there are upsides. People who garden tend to drink things like Chai Tea and like yammer on about "closure" and "feeling centered" and that is certainly not the sort of person I wish to be.