Abandon All Hope, Ye Who Enter Here.

Abandon All Hope, Ye Who Enter Here.

Thus marks the gates of hell and the way out of my garage.  You see, all gardening days start in the garage from whence comes gardening shoes (running shoes past their prime), gloves, buckets and tools.  I suppose it should say, "abandon all hope, ye who exit here", but that may be taking things just a bit too literally. Moving on.

Dante's Inferno clearly mentions the nine circles of hell and the punishments allotted to those who commit the deadly sins.  I really think he missed the most insidious punishment of all... quack grass.

Seriously, Bermuda grass (also known as Devil's grass) uses runners to insinuate itself into every part of the garden. There are two ways to get rid of it (read: slow its progress for a short while): cover the area for a year... yeah right, or dig down into the soil and pull the rhizomes out by hand.  Sounds easy, right?  It would be if the Georgia soil were not rock hard from years of drought, the grass rhizomes weren't terribly brittle and easily broken, and it wasn't DEVIL'S GRASS!

Seriously, Dante missed a level. Going down!


This stuff is in the big bed in the front yard and the big bed in the back yard... and in the yard itself, everywhere. I thought it was crab grass until I looked it up today.  Turns out that crab grass is fun and easy to pull, at least comparatively. Devil's grass requires the gardener to sit in the dirt and scratch at the soil until finding one of the runners.  Once the runner is spotted, the gardener must pull like mad until it breaks.  A really satisfying runner can be upwards of five or six feet long. An annoying one breaks off immediately and causes the gardener to employ several curse words of increasing intensity. Most runners are annoying, at best.

So, the 10th circle of hell is for mean people.  They will be forced to spend all eternity ridding a small bed of Devil's grass. Based on my gardening experiences, that would indeed be the very essence of Hell.