Obstinacy & hope

As of yesterday, approximately 2500-3000 square feet of our backyard are covered with plastic. It lends a certain trashy elan to the space, I like to think. The point is to kill out the bermuda grass in a less-expensive, lower-effort way (if it works). I plan to leave it down until we get back from vacation in September. Best-case scenario? The bermuda is gone and I can proceed with building my new beds. Worst? It doesn't really work, and I still have to pay a crew to dig it out. But even in the worst-case scenario, there are benefits. For one, that's about half of the backyard that we don't have to mow (the rest is a decent cover of St. Augustine, much less heinously invasive). For two, it's helped me understand the size of the backyard. I used 3 rolls of plastic, at 1000 square feet each. It ended up covering about half of the un-landscaped backyard, hence I can assume the space is roughly 5000 square feet (allowing for overlap and patchy coverage in the veggie garden). With an oddly shaped space like ours, it was hard to estimate size, and that's useful to know for fertilizing, etc. Finally, having such great swathes of currently "blank" space has helped me begin organizing future beds in my mind. The plastic neutralizes the numbing expanse of weedy green and kind of places a frame around it, so I can imagine what it will look like with beds in that area. So that's pretty cool. The lesson of last year's bamboo and this year's bermuda is this: flailing at an obstacle in an abject refusal to give up has it's own goofy grace. Also, nature is always gonna beat you in the end.