My gardening nemisis

I love gardening.  I love making pretty things grow.  I HATE however, not having a finished yard at the moment.  We have been working hard on the front yard, getting in the stones and sprinklers. Well, someone else worked hard on putting those things in, but you know... 

Our lot had apparently a lot of this weed going on. It's got a nasty four-sided double horn. Well, you take a look.  I am making this picture extra large so you can see the vastness of this devil thorn.  It's actually called Goat's Head, but I like Devil's Spawn better.  These two were just barely picked from the vine.

This is a size comparison.  This is a 9mo binky that I actually found in the back yard today.  In the picture above those are actually bigger.

It is a low growing ground cover that barbs itself into the dirt.  When you try to dig it out you must be so careful not to drop the 10's of 1000's of stickers there are out there.  Then they get dry and break apart making even more stickers.

 Did I mention that it is EVERYWHERE???

  BECAUSE IT IS!!

Once you start trying so very carefully pulling these up they get stuck in the bottom of your shoes. May I present Exhibits A & B.



The specks of dirt in between the stickers?  Those are stickers that have broken off leaving behind a barb in the bottom of your shoe. I had several of those in my yellow shoes that I had to pull out with tweezers because they were poking through to my foot.  Jason's Nike's food bed air pockets have also been punctured.  They also find there way onto my carpet no matter how hard you try to get them all off and into the garbage before they get in the house, but I'll tell you what.  That's why they are the Devil's spawn- they are sneaking in when you least expect it!  I need 1000 people to come over to my yard, wear thick soled rubber shoes and we'll pick them up that way.

 Or we can just cement the whole yard over and pretend we live in New York City where everything is concrete.  We would just have to use planters.