Jeremy and I spend probably too much time discussing some of the "joys" of home rentership. We really enjoy our house and feel very grateful to live in a beautiful neighborhood and to have such a breathtaking view of the mountains. Nevertheless, one of the (often literal) thorns in our side is the yard. When we rented this house, we inherited the (perhaps unecessarily) complex landscaping of the owners. And since we're getting such a smoking deal on the rent, we feel extremely motivated to keep the house and yard in tip-top shape.
Unfortunately, most of our yard work so far has become little more than a string of revelations about Things We Would Not Do in a yard. The yard is SO high maintenance and has so many different kinds of unusual flowers that have hundreds of bees and wasps in ecstasy from sunup to sundown that we feel like we can't even enjoy the benefits of having a yard.
Other than a lawn that is sprouting its share of troublesome weeds, the most irksome patch of yard is the backyard planter, which can best be described as a hodgepodge of perennials with a healthy undergrowth of weeds. Actually, after three (wo)man-hours last night, I think the planter can better be described now as just a hodgepodge of perennials. Because we rocked those weeds last night. They are now dying a slow death in our trash can, good riddance.
You can probably guess from the picture which weed was our favorite. I've been watching it grow for some time now, but I honestly assumed it was just a tall, kind of ugly flower (not a strange assumption since I can identify very few of the flowers in our yard) until I saw some growing in a field the other day and decreed that It Must Go. I know that weeds are just a social construction, but as contributing members of polite society we just couldn't let the beast keep growing. Jeremy pulled it. Jeremy is 6'2". We estimate the weed at about eight feet. I challenge any of you to find something more alarming growing in your yard (photographic evidence preferred).
