I seem to have inherited a Rose of Sharon (and all its stupid little rose of Sharon babies) from the person who lived at my property before me. Is there anything special I need to know about controlling them, or can I just kill them by cutting them off at ground level?

Yup, that’s exactly what people say before their kids shoot themselves in the head with the pistol “hidden” in the nightstand

If you’re that worried, start by beefing up your locks, installing an alarm system +/- cameras, and being careful to keep your doors locked.

“This house has expensive guns inside”

Relationships can work well even if they look very different from each other, but it’s pretty fucked up to have a long-term relationship where one of the partners pretty clearly doesn’t respect the other and says they wouldn’t be sad if it ended.

Get a square-bladed spade (the kind with a straight bottom edge, not a pointy one), and sharpen the edge with a file or a bench grinder. Use the spade to cut lines in the turf, spaced about the width of the spade’s blade. Next, go to one end of the lines and lift up a section of turf (turn the blade so that it’s parallel to the ground and cut the roots of the grass). Roll it up from one end to the other, using the spade as needed to separate the turf from the ground. Repeat until the sod is gone.

Caveat 1: this is pretty heavy work, I wouldn’t recommend doing it this way if you want to clear anything more than 30 to 50 square feet at the absolute maximum. Caveat 2: It can be very hard to grow new seeds there without also getting a lot of weed or grass seeds growing up at the same time (they’ve been waiting in the soil for the opportunity to grow). That’s what happened with a couple of areas where I stripped the sod, they got taken over by undesired plants and now I’m going to sheet mulch them.

Two of them are the purplish color of immature Ailanthus leaves and the foul odor if you crush the leaves

By the way, would the best and simplest way to protect the plants be to just put up a chicken wire fence that’s two or 3 feet high. (whatever the width of the roll of wire is) supported by stakes?

You should keep mowing it. As you thought, it’s almost certainly non-native turf grasses. Letting it grow long isn’t going to provide much ecological benefit and is probably going to look pretty messy.

Eh, it’s pretty unlikely that their grass is anything but the usual mix of non-native species

If you don’t mow it occasionally (once or twice a year) or do controlled burns, it’s going to be taken over by woody plants within a few years and turn into a thicket. If that’s what you want, great! Otherwise, you’ll need to do something to keep it at the “tall meadow” stage

Thanks, I’ll probably put up some chicken wire to protect them for the first growing season while they get established.

Do plugs of F. virginiana (wild strawberry) need to be protected from animals? Last fall I planted around half a dozen plugs of it (bare-root plants from Prairie Moon) and they seemed to do badly, I think only 1 or 2 survived. It seemed like some of them got dug up, though it was a little hard to tell. I decided to try again, and I’m getting a full flat of F. virginiana in a few weeks. Once I plant the plugs, do I need to put up chicken wire to protect them?

I think there can be brown rosin paper too. Of course, the paper you’re thinking of might be something else.

If someone just needs to use a drill a few times a year, Ryobi is just the thing for them

Police enforcement of traffic laws is notorious for both under-enforcement (letting off people who have “courtesy cards”, just plain refusing to do it, etc.) and over-enforcement as a pretext for stopping dark-skinned people, so anything that takes traffic enforcement out of their hands is a good thing

“What happened to professional courtesy?!1!”

If someone’s a big deal cardiothoracic surgeon, they can pay a goddamn speeding ticket. Besides, driving recklessly just increases the chances they’ll get in a crash instead of getting where they need to go.

Mew!

Thanks! I’ll probably go with smothering. Can I plant into it right after I lay it down? I’ve seen some sources say you need to wait a couple of weeks but I’m not sure why

I think that’s rosin paper

I know you’re a noob homeowner who barely knows which end of the drill to hold, but if you’re getting power tools you gotta go with Milwaukee Fuel!1!

Thanks! I am getting some free plugs from Adapt, a local community group, and will probably buy some more from a local native nursery. In the meantime, what do you recommend I do with the undesired plants that are already growing there? Should I keep them trimmed back a little so they can get overshadowed by natives later on, try to pull them by hand, just mulch everything?