Refactor My Garden

[boatgrave-deactivated20250901]

[mysteryteacup]

*Scrolls past*

*reluctant sigh*

*scrolls back up*

*rebogs*

[refactormygarden]

The garden has been sold… along with the house.

[refactormygarden]

Rickety retaining wall. This holds up all the ground my deck sits on, and it appears to be bowing outward and rotting. Do I just take it apart and replace it one section at a time? Seems like I’d need to remove all the ties for a section, dig the ground back a bit, and put new ones in from the bottom up.

[refactormygarden]

Two little fountains. I don’t know how to get them to work. They seem to have control boxes, but at least the cable coming out of the box for the large one is cut. There’s a pump in the bottom I can plug in, but nothing happens when I do 🤷‍♂️

[refactormygarden]

Natural Weed Killer

tl;dr -> salt, vinegar, and soap sort of works to kill weeds, really works to kill grass

The biggest and most obvious task I’ve got to tackle is getting rid of all the nasty weeds filling my garden. Pulling them is the first thought, but also the most painful, and according to the internet, not super effective, since it’s easy to leave roots in the ground that regrow next season.

Weed killer seems to be the way to go, but I’m trying to avoid causing a minor ecosystem crisis in my yard for nice bugs like bumble bees and butterflies. Not wasps. As far as I’m concerned they can take a long buzz off a short hive.

YouTube told me I could mix together vinegar, salt, and dish soap to kill weeds. So I did. And it did. At least, to some degree. What you see above is the result of one application a day or two ago. The leaves are burned, but it seems like there’s a long way to go to have an effect on those hearty stocks.

Unfortunately, the vinegar solution is super good at killing grass, too. ☠️

Is there another way around this? Or is this a place to make judicious use of the chemical weed killer?

[refactormygarden]

tl;dr -> software engineer learns to garden in weedy house

I’m a software engineer, and I just moved into an older house with landscaping whose original beauty is now overgrown and choked by weeds. The fountains aren’t working. The wooden retaining walls are rotting, shifting, and falling. All in all, it feels like the in-real-life equivalent of and old, unmaintained software project that needs some major “refactoring” (a software term that refers to changing, fixing, or updating without completely starting over).

I’m not a gardener, though. So this is like refactoring an old project while learning to code at the same time 😂.

Follow this blog to see if I can pull it off 🌹, or if it all goes up in weeds. 🥀🤞