{"id":1174,"date":"2008-10-29T18:40:42","date_gmt":"2008-10-30T00:40:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/paige.ericksonfamily.com\/?p=1174"},"modified":"2008-10-29T18:40:42","modified_gmt":"2008-10-30T00:40:42","slug":"putting-the-garden-to-bed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/paige.ericksonfamily.com\/?p=1174","title":{"rendered":"Putting the garden to bed"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>For the past couple of hours, I&#8217;ve been outside working on the the flower beds, getting ready to &#8220;put them to bed&#8221;.  It&#8217;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&#8217;t know how many nice days we&#8217;ll have to get these things done, so I was trying to take advantage of the nice afternoon.<\/p>\n<p>Once I get started, I actually don&#8217;t mind working in the flower beds.  It&#8217;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&#8217;s none of the whining or fighting that&#8217;s going on in the house, either, so it&#8217;s kind of quiet.  Occasionally a neighbor drives by and waves.<\/p>\n<p>While I was out there breaking my back with manual labor, I discovered a few things hidden in the plants.<br \/>\n-3 water bottles<br \/>\n-one bubble container<br \/>\n-sidewalk chalk<br \/>\n-one pair of gardening gloves<br \/>\n-three single gardening gloves<br \/>\n-one capri sun package<br \/>\n-ants.  lots of ants that weren&#8217;t too happy with me when I moved the pot they were infesting<br \/>\n-my sweet potato vines actually grew potatoes!<br \/>\n-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. <img src=\"http:\/\/www.paradisegarden.com\/shop\/img.php?id=1808&#038;x=225\" alt=\"\" \/><br \/>\n-if you put up a trelis for the baby clematis, the morning glory will think it&#8217;s for them and take it over<br \/>\n-just because you are wearing gloves, that doesn&#8217;t mean your fingernails won&#8217;t get all gross and broken.<br \/>\n-just because you&#8217;re wearing long sleeves, that doesn&#8217;t mean you won&#8217;t get scratches on your arms.  Or dirt.<br \/>\n-iris is extremely hardy, and so gosh darn hard to dig up that it&#8217;s easier to just let it take over the flower bed<br \/>\n-when killing the wisteria, if you don&#8217;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<br \/>\n-it&#8217;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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>For the past couple of hours, I&#8217;ve been outside working on the the flower beds, getting ready to &#8220;put them to bed&#8221;. It&#8217;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&#8217;t know how [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/paige.ericksonfamily.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1174"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/paige.ericksonfamily.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/paige.ericksonfamily.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paige.ericksonfamily.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paige.ericksonfamily.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1174"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/paige.ericksonfamily.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1174\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1178,"href":"https:\/\/paige.ericksonfamily.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1174\/revisions\/1178"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/paige.ericksonfamily.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1174"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paige.ericksonfamily.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1174"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paige.ericksonfamily.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1174"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}