Weekend Work Five: My Garden Space of Shame

Every gardener has an area of their garden that provides shame, humiliation, embarrassment, and guilt, right? (Tell me it's not just me!)

I remember GardeningWhileIntoxicated.com bravely posted about her garden space area of shame years ago. I couldn't find it in the archives of her blog, perhaps it was too overwhelming a source of shame she "unposted" it.

My Space of Shame is behind my garage. It's a narrow space of about three feet between garage and fence. I've tried pulling, poisons, and plastic to keep the weeds down back there. I (and garden visitors) cannot see back there, so it tends to get not tended. And it gets out of control.

Nasty knotweed is pretty well established back there (you can see it mocking me in the back of the photo above), there's wall-crawling (and paint peeling) English ivy, some vining wild-grape-looking thing, as well as dozens of other weeds. Any fix we make is only temporary.

The area of mess and shame has extended to the area between my deck and the fence (right). This area can only be seen if we pull out the picnic table and you're sitting on that side of the table.


Well, we cleaned it all out (again!).

On the area behind the picnic table we threw in pachysandra taken from taking out the Harry Potter Garden area, as well as some dirt/sod from the hellstrip paver pad project in the front yard. The neighbors have pachysandra on their side of the fence. Hopefully ours will take root and we'll finally be in harmony with the neighbors – at least that section of shame.

But behind the garage – I have no permanent solution.

Maybe that has to be paved too – dug out, crushed stone, base sand weed barrier, sand and large paving stones. But who wants to do all that for a not-easily accessible area that no one sees? I'm at a loss.