one day off

Despite there being much to do at work, I took one day off to weed my own garden.  Allan’s little garden looks perfect:

Allan’s garden with Maddy

Disporum ‘Night Heron’

Impatiens omieana

I love the new foliage on this mahonia.

apple blossom

After that pleasant interlude admiring Allan’s tidy garden, I moved on to the three big weedy beds in the backyard.  I want to see if a before and after set of photos even shows the results of six hours of almost-steady weeding.

east bed, before

east bed after a couple of wheelbarrow of weeds went away

middle garden, before

My reward for getting middle garden weeded, I decided when I began, would be to put out my birthday present from Judy.

middle garden, after

with Ross the pig

west garden, before

west garden, after

I completely filled our large wheelie bin with weeds, with one bucket and one wheelbarrow left over, and dumped at least another wheelbarrow full of compostable items (that is, thinned perennials rather than invasive weeds) onto the debris pile.  I wish I had tomorrow off as well; without any rain, we have to check on watering at several places and we have plants to plant.  I did not get time to plant any in my own garden, but I think I would rather wait for some rain.  (The soil is moisty underneath here at home, I am glad to say.)   My friend Kathleen S stopped by to visit but my dedication to weeding trumped my true desire to just sit down with her on the patio.

Some good things I saw along the way:

my good friends Frosty and Smokey

white verbascum

Tulip ‘Cummins’

bogsy woods plant table

a new rose

shade bed has a few big weeds, but not bad.

shade bed

Sambucus ‘Sutherland Gold’

scilla outside the deer fence

the outer bogsy woods

Some not so good things:

The pond between us and the port parking lot is drying up but there are still little tadpoles in it.

will tadpoles survive?

I am losing my tunnel through the salmonberries:

disappearing path

One side of the middle bed has lots of reseeded California poppies.  The other side has none!

unbalanced

If we ever get rain again, I’ll transplant some to the empty side.

Santolina ‘Lemon Fizz’ wants to revert to green.

I need to find time to trim him, AND to chop the Sedum ‘Autumn Joy’ by half so it won’t flop open.

The Bright Lights chard that bolted to taller than me is sadly representative of how I rarely get around to harvesting and eating any edible thing that I grow.

a giant

The patio still needs weeding:

patio

My Rosa pteracantha is still dead.

I thought I saw a new shoot, but apparently not.

And the real heartbreaker:  There are hardly any sweet peas along here.  I think it might be because I got too busy to regularly apply Sluggo, so maybe they got eaten.

where ARE they???

Next year, instead of planting all of them at once, I will make two plantings, one on the outside and one on the inside, a week apart.  And I will not go on a trip in April.  And I will put out Sluggo every day.

I will have to find an alternative, perhaps an annual vine that I can acquire in pots…or maybe the few remaining sweet peas will surprise me.

Meanwhile, Allan worked up at Discovery Heights, deadheading hundreds of narcissi:

pre-deadheading

and saw a coyote, but it moved fast so he just got a blurry photo:

coyote on the move