While I feel your pain, this is hilarious!!! hahaha
I recently learned that garlic mustard has a long tap root. When I pull it up it feels like I've easily gotten it all, but in fact I've left that root where it will send up greenery ten or twenty fold. That shot of the tiny garlic mustard seedlings is horrifying!!!
But I also know that, with all this work you put in, you have some gorgeous garden spots. You are an excellent garden mommy.
Aw, thanks. Upon further reflection, I worried that I had offended this community, having failed to convey how much of the Light and Dark, Joyful and Sorrowful, Effort and Reward are at play here. At play being a key word. I tend to sound strident and awful when I'm really having fun with words more than anything. Just gotta get that across better. Thanks so much for your support @owasco! Not many people "get" me, but you do. :)
@owasco, it occurs to me that part of your apparent ease dealing with conquering alien hordes is that you're working in a smaller space than my own seven acres of wetland, woodland, clay, savanna (dry prairie) and other crazy-different ecosystems on one little acreage. I try not to laugh at those who complain about shoveling their driveways in town--mine is longer than a football field and I've hand-shoveled the heavy, wet snow many times.
Smaller scale gardening... that would simplify my life. My own sister scoffed at me for pulling weeds in my "Little Forest" - called it a waste of time! - but she hadn't seen the purple haze of wild geranium blanketing the understory. Didn't see my bluebell colonies. Didn't consider that restoring a little piece of my world is a mission to me, my most valuable contribution aside from being a blood donor, but that is another chapter...
This is very much how my yard looks, except that so many of my natives perished (my pairie smoke! rattlesnake master! Leadplant! and voles at all but one of the 80 liatris bulbs I planted along the long driveway!): Micro prairies: No yard is too small to go with earth-friendly native plants via @journalsentinel
That's my dream yard! Alas, I do not conquer anything. I let it be for the most part. Garlic mustard has killed more desirable plants than I can remember (comfrey, lilies, valerian and eupatorium among them), and now the lamium is coming along and killing the garlic mustard. It's a good thing I think lamium is pretty. Vinca keeps poison ivy down.
I have never been able to grow two things here - echinacea and lavender. The echinacea, supposedly deer resistant, is one of the first plants deer reduce to stubble. Lavender just will not grow here, no matter where I plant it.