Battling fleas in a very large rural yard

[HillWilliam]

15. I'm having a little luck getting spearmint started

Lemonbalm (another mint family member) seems to be doing well. The spearmint hasn't really taken off yet, but I've got one good patch.

I had wonderful luck with four o'clocks one year and one year only. After that I couldn't get them to come up. Man, those are a lovely flower and they smell SO WONDERFUL. They attract pollenators and hummers but they are positively lethal to japanese beetles who can't seem to resist them. I've never seen so many dead japanese beetles in all my life as under the one beautiful (70-foot!) row of four o'clocks I managed to get going. After that, they never would come up again.

The ground I'm now calling my yard (a bit tongue in cheek, I suppose) had been a tobacco field for some 250 years. When it became a plot for a house about 20 years ago, the idiots that attempted to smooth it simply pushed the topsoil off and shoved most of it down the hill. What was left is lumpy, bumpy, ill-graded, not leveled in any way, and a definite PITA to get anything to grow -- including grass. It has taken five years to establish something like a yard from native grasses. Something besides weeds, that is.

Trying to do this something like organically has been quite a bit more of a challenge. There are plenty of horse farms and dairy barns around, but a couple of years ago the motor in my pickup blew, so hauling poop to shore up the fertility of the garden hasn't been an option. (Poop is free if you haul it.) My husbear would wring my neck I'm sure if I even joked about bringing cowpoop home in the family car

We're noodling over the idea of a guinea tractor. That might could work. Guineapoo is as good a fertilizer as chickenpoo and would do my poor yard and endless amount of good. Along with eradicating fleas, it sounds like a win/win.

I need to read everything I can about guineas, chicken tractors, etc alongside this thread.

We priced fleabane seed. That sounds like another option. Not cheap but a durnsight cheaper than treating after the fact. I like.