Hmm... I guess I am confused by what I read on the Roundup bottle vs Groundclear. I might've misunderstood it, but Roundup seems to be targeted at only specific weeds, and is supposed to leave the grasses alone, but Groundclear is supposed to kill *everything*, which is what I want to happen. (though each of them does have a list of specific plants they are "targeted" for, on the bottles).
I'm only using it well outside the yard, so it's not an issue with the dogs (mine, anyway; and there arent' any others that are grazers that come around my area). I am only trying to keep from having to use up time and energy I don't really have, to keep the grass and weeds (mostly grass) from sprouting up constantly and quickly and tall-ly from all the sidewalk and asphalt cracks, mostly on the streets south and east sides of the yards.
Also using it to do the same in the alleyway, but that's less of a concern most of the time, as water doesn't collect there like it does in the gutter to feed the totally-unwanted plant life.
(and in the alley, it doesn't store itself up, either, cuz it just evaporates like everywhere else even after it's soaked in, but in the street/sidewalk gutter area, it stays under the pavement for a long long time once it soaks in thru the cracks after a rain, since there's no other drainage, and my corner happens to be the low point in the area, so all that water stays until plants growing out of the cracks use it up).
I've used groundclear before with no problems like this time; either suddenly all the grass in the cracks is adapted to it now, or else the actual groundclear is not the same as it was, or it isn't actualy groundclear in the bottle, or soemthing.
Anyway, here's the pic of the progress as it sat since Sunday's death of weedeater. The part farthest from the camera along the sidewalk is waht's trimmed, well north of the gate in the fence (lighter colored part). Basically is ground-off down to the asphalt / concrete there, like I typically ahve to do every week that it is not really hot and dry. Closer to camera you can better see the problem, though teh groundclear does seem to be doing *something*, it isn't enough yet. I don't want to treat it any more, becuase I don't wanna risk it getting to the tree or lantana roots, even though those ought to be well within the yard, rather than under the sidewalk. I also did not treat the actual sidewalk anywhere in those areas, either (and never treat the ground between fence and sidewalk), to avoid that sort of thing.
In other news, right before my vacation, just to make things harder on myself, I just smashed my left thumb yesterday morning.
Yogi decided it would be really cool to start pawing my plants out of those white plastic ex-animal-shipping-boxes i'd been using as planters, on the ground at the base of the wall of the house at the back porch area. :/
So I shooed him away (whcih didn't really work but stopped his digging) and I picked htem up one at a time, and slowly (they're heavy, being full of wet dirt and plants) got them moved to spots across the arms of the chairs there, so it's less likely he'll continue his molestation of them.
Well, on the last one, I managed to slip with my left hand and let go of the edge of the box, and get my thumb between the arm of the chair and that edge as it fell...so it sheared thru the cuticle on the inner-edge of my thumb (you know, the part next to where you'd hit the spacebar on a keyboard with, or touch things, pick stuff up, rest your finger, etc etc), and squish my whole thumb's end joint/segment /pad between the chair arm and box edge, brusing it all the way inside.
This is hte one I was setting down when it happened:
and I didn't take a pic of my thumb (didn't think of it at the time) but you can still see the bandaid over the torn cuticle in the pic below. (I took the pic so I could try to figure out what plant that is there; I thought maybe tomato at first, but I dunno how the seeds woudl've gotten in there, if so...it should just have Lantana in there, though obviously there is something else that was in the dirt that has grown anyway).
And in this one, that I've had over by the sheds under a mulberry tree on this chair since early summer, it has a mulberry tree growing in it (but that's on purpose, as I saved the sproutling from some other place it oculdn't be allowed to grow till I decide what to do with it).
So yesterday it was just throbbing away, pretty constantly, all day long at work, and thru much fo the night. I finally got to sleep pretty good after a while, though, as it's been an exhausting few days, and hwen I woke to Tiny digging me out of bed and Yogi cleaning my face to tell me it was breakfast time, the throbbing had stopped but it was still very sore and stiff, and swollen a fair bit (at least 50% bigger than it should be, on the pad area).
It's about that state now, too, though the swelling is down a little since I keep moving it around and pushing on the pad to help push fluids around inside for better circulation (since I'm sure blood vessels are damaged by the squishing, or it wouldn't be so swollen). it isn't discolored though, so it'll just take a while to heal up.
Yogi must've been after something *under* the planters, though, cuz he kept digging there after I'd pulled them up (after I'd gone inside to fix my finger up)...Dunno if he found it, but he did finally give up before reaching China.
And in funnier news:
Yogi has a silly new name: Yogi-dogi Itchynosy
(spelled ichinose, but mispronounced, of course, so everything more or less rhymes with long "o" and hard "g" sounds)
No particular reason; I just started saying things to get his attention, and somehow that came up.
View attachment 10
He also has a new trick:
I reach for hte side of his face to scratch the corner of his jaw, which is his "dreamy spot" (like Tiny's is the front edge of her shoulders), and he'll let me almost touch and then he'll duck his head down and to the side, then dive for the floor as if he's gonna snatch something up, scrabble around on teh floor trying to get traction to run, then take off running in circles around me if we're outside or else fall and crash into something when we're inside...then get up and run outside and run around in circles. :lol:
The grave-covering lantana is pretty danged big now. The tallest one is one of the ones they'd chainsawed to ground level for no reason back when I moved back in, but the ones in front of it are the ones planted there for the dog markers not long after that. Another mulberry is recovering very quickly now, at the right edge of the grave. I orignally planted the new "eucalyptus" (moved from the front yard as a stump) a little ways north of that, at the northwest corner of the grave, to replace it, same time as the lantanas on the graves, because I didn't expect it to recover...so now I have to decide where to move the eucalyptus to, as they can't both grow there, unless I decide to always trim the E down as a "bush" instead (not sure that will work, either).
I have a number of places to move the eucalyptus to, though, where others did not survive the summer, in those two rows I made on east and west sides of the yard--especially over by the sheds, at the south end of the row, where one I really had hopes for didn't make it.
Another eucalyptus I am gonna just *have* to try to save by transplanting is the one that had been growing before the fire right at the water faucet at the north edge of the house itself, which of course had to be cut off at ground level, as if it was aloowed to grow it'd end up breaking wall or foundation. It's recovered multiple times as I have cut it off myself every week since summer started, and it's obviously not going to just die, so I might as well give it a real chance and dig as much of it out as I can (which is gonna be a fairly heroic effort given where it is and how big it's roots must be), and move it somewhere it can be useful. No pic of that one,though. Not much to see right now but a few leaves on a stump. :lol:
I also found an Transonic 300 electronic pest repeller at Goodwill, from the late 1990s. Seems to be functional, though how well it works I coudn't say yet. Though it's supposed to be for rodents and bugs, I was hoping it'd work on cats to keep the ferals from using my front yard as a litter box
(don't have to worry about hte back anymore wiht Yogi keeping them out), but I can see that for at least one of the black cats it doesn't work. He (she?) sleeps on the porch not too far from it, usually is there when I get home. Obviously isn't driving that one away (though the dogs don't like it much, if I leave it on audible and boost you can evne still hear it inside the house wiht all the windows and doors closed up!).
It has a number of switches for various modes, and I've tried all fo them to no apparent effect on the cats. I will probably have to research on the web what kind of frequencies/etc might wokr to keep cats away, and modify it so it will output those, if it's possible. A future project, most likely, as I already have my vacation next week getting quickly filled up with projects I can't do in my short little bits of "spare" time during normal workweeks.
) 
