I'll let you in on a secret They don't tell you when you buy a home with a yard because They want you to fail. I don't know who They are, exactly, but I have on good authority They may be connected to the Illuminati. Or maybe it was my mother's elite sewing group. The latter is more powerful, so I hope it's not that one.

The thing They don't tell you is there is actually a pretty simple trick to avoiding having to spend every weekend weeding every square inch of your plot of God's land. I learned this the hard way. When I first bought my home in the Year Of Our Lord two thousand and fourteen, it was already winter. Spring came along and so did thorns and thistles (thanks Adam and Steve) and I spent the better part of my summer fighting them back with a blow torch like at the end of Arachnophobia when the dad has to kill the grand daddy spider.

A couple years later I discovered that I didn't have to live this way. I don't know how I discovered it, exactly. Someone may have shared it with me. Or the spirit of Martha Stewart (she has me just call her "The Marth") came to me in a dream. Whatever it was, the advice was so good that I now worship it. I do a naked fire dance in front of an artistic depiction of this advice every Arbor Day. I've been arrested over this five times now. Not a good look for religious freedom.

The trick is to go into your yard as early as Oprah will allow, clean out the flower beds, put down preventative weed stuff (I use preen. #notgettingpaid #SHOULDbegettingpaid), and then cover the area with mulch. I started doing this in like 2016 and I swear to you we do not get a single weed anywhere for the entire summer. You have to do it as early as possible. In Salt Lake City, I go out and do it basically as the last snow is melting from the yard (usually the first weekend of March).

I tell you all of this because, gurl, that's how I just spent my weekend. It was a good distraction because of a bad medical scare in the family I may tell you more about soon.

I think my neighbors every year think I'm straight up nuts. I literally shoveled snow off of part of my flower beds so I could rake out some fallen leaves. I ran the lawn mower to clean up debris from the annual pruning of the rose bushes. I'm acting like it's July at my house and not, well, winter.

But I'll be the one laughing in June when they're out every Saturday on their hands and knees digging out their earthly scourges. I'll be sitting on my front porch, sloshing a glass of red wine in one hand, cackling, and sharing a charcuterie board with The Marth.  

And with my Duncan Punkin.

Please enjoy some Strangerville:

This time in Strangerville, Meg and Eli are very bad at business. And a woman has a terrifying experience navigating a highway.

Story:

Manhole, by Laney Hawes (Music by Jackson F. Smith)

Production by Eli McCann, Meg Walter, & The Beehive

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~It Just Gets Stranger