Up By the Road Ditch

Up by the road ditch in the front yard is a huge azalea bush.  In recent years, we've planted a baby's breath bush beside it for the white color to contrast against the hot pink.  It's in full bloom right now.  Actually, it's a good thing I got a photo of it when I did because we had a 2 inch downpour of rain today and most of the flowers are faded and torn up.  Glad I got a photo of the azalea in all its glory.  This azalea is one that we moved from my grandmother's house in Kinder.  I like planting things that have a story or some history.  That way when we walk around the yard, the sights spur fond memories.  The azalea is happy and is flourishing.  We planted in to anchor the western side of our yard.  It's doing a nice job.

Something that is not doing a nice job is the parish crew that is in charge of the ditches.  They pass by in a truck and spray Round-up in the ditch.  This variety of roundup kills everything buy Bermuda grass.  I can see why they do it.  It keeps the ditches clean so that water flows easily through it.  It also reduces the amount of time that they have to pass by with a tractor and cut the grass.

There's one problem, however.  They consistently over-shoot the ditch and spray Round-up 3 feet onto my property.  I'll show why that's a problem in a minute.  To combat this, I ordered some plastic corrugated signs and made some homemade placards to kindly and diplomatically request no spray on the ditch in front of our yard/pasture.  I have the similar message on the back side in the event they spray coming from the other direction.

Here's the issue and my grievance with the herbicide.  Roundup kills the grass down to the dirt.  This makes their job easier, BUT barren soil with no grass and no root structure holding it together creates an erosion problem.  You can see below how my topsoil on my property is eroding into the ditch.  Topsoil that should be growing grass now is slowly filling the ditch.  At some point the ditch will have so much of my soil in it that it won't properly drain.  Then they'll come with a track-hoe and a dump truck and scoop up my top soil and carry it away.

Erosion!

The downside of "No Spray" is that I'll have to take responsibility for keeping the ditch clean.  You can see in the photo below that I used a string trimmer to weed-eat the entire ditch.  It is not a terrible job to do this, but it's not a job I prefer doing.  The thing I thought about is the job will become a terrible job in August when the temperature approaches 100 and the humidity level approaches 100% as well!

I don't know.  We'll discuss this again in August.  It may make me re-think my position on "No Spray."