Putting the garden to bed

For the past couple of hours, I’ve been outside working on the the flower beds, getting ready to “put them to bed”. It’s an exhausting process that involves cutting back the dead foliage, pulling out the weeds and overgrown plants, chopping, cutting, pulling, repeat. With the cold weather coming back soon, I don’t know how many nice days we’ll have to get these things done, so I was trying to take advantage of the nice afternoon.

Once I get started, I actually don’t mind working in the flower beds. It’s a pleasant temperature, I can hear one daughter practicing the piano in the house, and can keep an eye on two of the kids playing outside. There’s none of the whining or fighting that’s going on in the house, either, so it’s kind of quiet. Occasionally a neighbor drives by and waves.

While I was out there breaking my back with manual labor, I discovered a few things hidden in the plants.
-3 water bottles
-one bubble container
-sidewalk chalk
-one pair of gardening gloves
-three single gardening gloves
-one capri sun package
-ants. lots of ants that weren’t too happy with me when I moved the pot they were infesting
-my sweet potato vines actually grew potatoes!
-my husband threw away the canna lilies I had painstakingly dug up, cut off all the foliage and was going to save so that I could grow them again next year. Threw them away.
-if you put up a trelis for the baby clematis, the morning glory will think it’s for them and take it over
-just because you are wearing gloves, that doesn’t mean your fingernails won’t get all gross and broken.
-just because you’re wearing long sleeves, that doesn’t mean you won’t get scratches on your arms. Or dirt.
-iris is extremely hardy, and so gosh darn hard to dig up that it’s easier to just let it take over the flower bed
-when killing the wisteria, if you don’t kill and/or dig out EVERY. SINGLE. piece of it, it will start up again and attempt to take over the entire area again and again
-it’s much more fun to plant flowers in the spring than it is to dig them up and trim them all back in the fall.