This is an awesome blog!

In our neighborhood we do all of those things to help one another. I just recently house/pet sat for a friend who was gone for a week. I also checked up on Grandma, who is 87, to make sure all was OK with her. Not a hard thing to do and everybody wins!

I totally agree MP. What did people do BEFORE all this government "help"? In one article one lady said, "you go into survival mode". One cannot simply sit around and moan and groan and "expect" big brother to take care of us. IF we let them do that pretty soon we will have no choices whatsoever.

Good advice and food for thought. Hope everybody reads it.

I've cut back on the canned cat food, much to the consternation of the cats. But they can live with mostly dry food and it saves me $50 a month. As for the victory garden, anyone have an idea of how to handle weeds and nutgrass when the neighbors refuse to treat their yards for them? Weed fabric does nothing when seeds get carried from their yard to mine on animals and on the wind. I don't have enough hours on the weekend to weed the borders out front, much less a veggie garden out back. I was considering building a raised box over the seedlings and putting a screened cover on the box, but not sure how much that would help with the weeds (it's mostly to keep the cats and insects off the young seedlings). Anyone tried this before?

If you apply a heavy top mulch (about 5" and keep it up all summer long) you should be able to not have many weeds. Nut grass is the scourge of man kind.

I kid you not, after AT&T dug up one of my front borders to upgrade to the u-Verse curbside box, I got nutgrass in that border. Started right at the AT&T box too. I can't be sure it was their digging tools. Perhaps an animal dropped off some seeds there while it sat dug up for three weeks (AT&T took that long to come back and fill in the hole they made). But all I can say is nutgrass is even more of a pain to remove when it's wrapped around a utility box.

Borrow some books on mulching from the library. We have used newspaper in the past to kill off the nut grass.   Loosen up your soil really well then scrape aside the top 4 or 5 inches put down multiple layers of newspaper about 12 pages thick.  Then rake the dirt back over the top of the newspaper.  Then cover everything with a nice thick layer of dead leaves.   Water often to speed decomposition.  Then plant stuff.  Pull weeds when they peek through the mulch.   Your nut grass will not disappear the first year but you will eventually kill it all off.    Like I said before in a perfect world all snails would love to eat nut grass and nothing else.

Nut grass is evil~ it has those tiny "nuts" buried deep in the ground,that is why they are so tough to kill.

From the garden gurus.  Apply herbicide to nutgrass in the early morning because the plants are open then to receive moisture and the pesticide will get into the roots.    If you wait til up in the day, they are closed and the herbicide won't penetrate.

The second scourge to mankinds lawn is crabgrass.  When I moved in here I had a great Bermuda lawn.  Now it's almost entirely crabgrass.  I had a mow and blow guy so didn't pay any attention to it until last spring and I fought it all summer.  I know have trenches where I've pulled it up in clumps.  There are apparently two different kinds growing but the worst is the the with runners as thick as my little finger.

As far as I've found, Weed and Feed should be named Feed The Weed for all the good it does.  I'm spraying the whole shebang with crabgrass killer (which stunts and almost kills Bermuda too) and may not have a green lawn this summer...but I can't even mow the crabgrass it's so thick.

I don't have a lot of money to spend on remedies either..this is crazy.

: ) Could try raising a weed garden and moan when the Bermuda grass takes over.

I do my part and wash my car when the farmers need rain.

Hey Cat, now there's a thought worth considering.  Last summer I mowed right down to the roots then this winter started reading up on crab grass.  Seems you need to mow long because it doesn't do well when shaded.  Groooooaaaannnn...all summer I was making it healthier. 

I didn't start setting the mower higher until fall when it got so tough I could barely push the mower.  You'd think the idiot mow and blow guy would have told me but he never said a word.   He's taken care of the people down the streets yard for over 20 years and it looks beautiful.  I guess he didn't think advice was warranted for just mowing.

One of the problems using the "pass-through-the-neighborhood-mowing-as-the y-go" guys is that they carry those weed seeds from yard to yard on their mowers.

Yeah, there's crabgrass like crazy around here too. That I have given up on since the neighbor doesn't treat for that either and the seeds will just blow on over even if I did treat. I considered putting down a crabgrass pre-emergent, except it's already emerged. That's what we get for living in California. It never gets cold enough to kill all the weeds. I just pull the crabgrass when I see it out front and mow it whenever it pops up in the back (I do have my mower set to "tall" too). And yeah, weed and feed seems to do nothing, even on things it says it kills like dandelions and burr clover.

I switched last year to watering only twice a week (even during summer) and that did seem to limit the crabgrass and burr clover a bit. At least it stopped the clover from producing burrs and stopped the crabgrass from spreading much. Luckily the nutgrass hasn't made it to the front lawn yet, just that front border by the driveway amongst all the shrubbery. I did have my lawn soil analyzed by Gardeners Supply and they said the pH was too high, so in the next couple weeks I'm going to put down some pH treatment and fertilizer. I might also reseed it a little bit to get some nice spring grasses that'll outcompete the weeds before the bermuda fully wakes up from its winter slumber.

I also stopped watering the side yard entirely since it was completely weeds and most of that is nutgrass (it had been a dog run for the prior owners so no grass really). But even without watering it myself, I still have weeds because water seeps under the fence every time the neighbor waters. I tried mowing once too soon after my neighbor watered and the mower got mired in mud, that's how much water seeps under. It's like a bog. I want to turn that side yard into a veggie garden, but egads... the weed problem. Hence my original comment on this thread.