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Poison

When we first bought this house it was brand new. The front yard was landscaped but the back yard was as weedy as any field. After a couple years of weed whacking it we decided it was time to put in some grass.  Ufortunately, what we found when we shopped around for prices shocked us. 3000-4000 to remove the weeds, and put new grass in. Did we need a yard that bad? Thankfully we found a place that would do it for 1500.  While still chokingly steep it was a lot better.  You might also wonder why we didn’t just do the work ourselves.  Well it’s because we didn’t have too. I’m a wimp and I do not do manual labor.

The crummy thing is when you go for bargain prices, most of the time you get what you paid for.  They did a crappy job, but thankfully our neighbor works for the city doing all the lawn work. He helped us realize how screwed we were getting and what the guy needed to fix. It all cumulated with a fight with landscaping guy over his refusal to fix anything, and trying to charge us 500 dollars for grass seed that was not in our contract.  Don’t worry. We won both those arguments, but wow was the guy furious.  

Even though the guy did some fixes to the yard, it still ended up bad. The first year we came across things  growing that really didn’t belong in a lawn. We discovered some nice squash, and a group of plants that looked like green cherry tomatoes.  I offered to eat one but curtis wouldn’t let me. His reasoning was it could be poison! I shook my head and decided when they ripened red I would rub his nose in my superior flora skills. Next time we wandered out to check on the little plants we were surprised to find the little tomatoes turning dark. Just so you know the plant belladonna nightshade is a poison that is related to tomatoes and turns dark when ripe. Eeek! Those things got mowed down quick.

It’s been several years, and our backyard has settled down a bit. We have settled into the habit of waiting until the mowing is a huge chore before I start giving Curtis the look that its time to get the mower out.  It’s still half weeds, but no more poison growing. Or so we thought.

Last week we were watching the tv show House. We are still getting caught up in this last season, and finally got to the episode with the poison hemlock that they thought was a wild carrot.  Wait a second. Great. We had those plants growing in our yard too, but was it carrot or hemlock?  I had even been tempted to nibble on one a time or two when I was pulling weeds but never did.  Seriously, Darwinism at its finest.  Thanks to the web I found the difference between the poison and the veggie, and rushed outside to figure it out.

Much to curtis’s relief it was just wild carrot. That’s when I got the lecture from him about not putting strange things in my mouth. I’m pretty sure I got tine same speech from one of my parents when I was a kid. Obviously it didn’t do much good. I’m also sure you could also fit a ‘that’s what she said’ joke in here somewhere, but I’m really not that good.

So please kids. Make sure you know what it is before you put it in your mouth. You don’t want to get caught. Errr….that’s what she said? Urgh.  Anyone want to do better?