Last summer, Sir Monkeypants spent many long, hard hours building a swingset in our backyard. It’s an awesome structure, with a treehouse-type fort, slide, pirate wheel, and three swings. I did almost nothing to help with this project, except for occasionally trying feebly to get the kids out of his hair while he was using scary things like circular saws and nail guns. I didn’t do a very good job of curbing their interest, but hey, no one ended up with a nail in their head, so I consider that a success.

When the swingset was all done, I had just one job to do, and that was to decide what to do with the space under the elevated deck of the treehouse part. In theory it was a square space for a sandbox, but we had heard some horror stories about neighbourhood cats using uncovered sandboxes as litterboxes, and that was just too gross to even think about, so sand was out of the question. Eventually we decided to just fill it with gravel or mulch, and put a little picnic table there for the kids to have freezies in the shade.

The only real “step” in accomplishing this master design was killing the grass in the square. We definitely didn’t want it poking up through the gravel/mulch, and we definitely didn’t want to leave it as grass as it would be totally impossible to cut. Since it was such a small area with deep sides, and a low ceiling, it was really hard to try to pull up the sod, and I didn’t want to spray it with any of those products from the Home Depot that have a hundred warnings of INSTANT DEATH and the really cool picture of a skeleton hand on them, since the kids would be playing there. So I came up with my master plan: death through covering. I’d cut the grass as short as possible with our weed whacker, and then I’d get black garden fabric — the kind of stuff that is supposed to prevent weeds from rooting in a new garden — and lay it over the grass. Certainly nothing could survive this foolproof plan!

That was late last fall, and already, the plan seems to be failing. I can’t believe that grass that is getting no light at all can survive, but it seems to be having no trouble growing. Tall shoots are coming out the sides of the fabric, and little shoots are coming right through the fabric in a cool pattern that I believe spells out, “sucker.” I’ve been pulling out the little plants as fast as I can, and cutting down the sides, but man, I really, really hate that patch of grass. Why is it that the grass in our front yard gets dry and brittle and brown and full of weeds, while this little piece which is covered with black cloth seems to have no problem thriving? Nature, she is a bitch.

I must admit I never got around to actually adding the planned gravel/mulch/whatever on top of the fabric, so now my new plan is to go get that stuff, and dump it all over the fabric, and suffocate the hell out of the little green buggers. Hopefully it works…but to tell the truth, I think I can hear the grass blades giggling in victory already.