Lawn care, the cheap and haphazard way

So the grass forest next door is back. It is already as tall as my son in some places. It hasn't begun to encroach on our lawn just yet, but I know that any and all seeds will soon start wafting their way across our tiny fence. Adding more to our already overwhelming wilderness, I started to get a bit creative in my weed control. When we moved from our old apartment into this lovely new home there were a few things that we just didn't need anymore. This included a couple of blankets that were so gross and grungy I didn't want them inside the new house and a linoleum sheet my husband had bought a decade prior to meeting that we used to cover the tatami flooring to protect it from little kids and us adult big kids. Repurposing these things as a temporary ground cover, I have found a cheap solution for eradicating the weeds, solarization. I basically cook the weeds using blankets and the sun.

Notice the rectangular patches of dirt where nothing grows.

 What it seems most Japanese do when they first buy a house and also what is recommended online, is to cover the whole area in black sheets and let the sun roast any seeds in the ground. Seeing as one sheet costs seven thousand yen and it would take about three sheets to cover everything, my blankets are working out as a nice temporary and free solution until I can spend my money on what I really want, which is lawn grass and landscaping supplies. This doesn't, however, solve the problem of the small amount of lawn grass we do have growing uncontrollably (however thankfully healthily) and the places where just throwing a blanket over the area to cover the problem won't work.

That is where our lovely new weedwhacker comes in. Unfortunately, because it is corded I can't quite reach the end of our lawn.

The tall grass near the front tire is the outer limit of the weedwhacker.

This just means I need to expand my flower bed to match the weedwhacker radius. I also pulled up some of the lawn grass that came with the house and rearranged it where it will be of more use.

The "hole" it has left will be made into a third parking space, but until then, that linoleum flooring is the perfect size to keep those pesky neighboring seeds from invading.