As I mentioned in the spider post, we decided to rid our yard of the black widow breeding grounds and rip out all that ivy.
This ivy:
Sure, it looks pretty here but most of the year it is all brown and burnt and unhappy. Our dry California heat is no good for it. It looks like a small patch, but a stripe of this shit spans our entire backyard. So we ripped it out. I say we, but really, I mean "they" as in the two guys with big shovels that we hired. No way I'd stick my hands in there knowing what lurks beneath.
So then it looked like this:
To which I reacted as such: "Crap! What did we do to our backyard? Was I too quick in deciding to yank it out? Did I make a crazy decision with little thought based on emotions as usual?" And to my husband, "Why did you let me talk you into this?"
After a brief panic, we talked about what to replace the ivy with. Yes, I'm fully aware that most people would have had this all planned out beforehand. Not me. My thoughts had only gone so far as, "have black widows...must rip out ivy...NOW!"
A trip to the nursery and a carload of herbs later, I was feeling downright calm again. We want to plant primarily edibles on our property and we knew this would be a great spot for an herb garden. The herb garden was on our "do it someday" list and I really didn't think it would happen for a few years at least.
So I spent the rest of the afternoon relaxing with the above view. The two of them planted until the sun started to set, everything from rosemary to savory to lemongrass. And now we have the lovely herb garden we always dreamed about planting someday. All thanks to some black widow spiders. Funny how things like this work out, eh?
