I decided not to add a new category: Pain. It belongs here, but it’d (hopefully) be so bloody rare as to be much like a broken pencil.
You saw one before-ish (more middle-ish, really) picture from the front yard, day before yesterday. Here’s one more deeply before picture: the right-hand bed off the front porch:
Right porch bed before cleanup
You might need to click on the image to get the full extent of the pain this bed caused me yesterday. Bracketing the bed are a pair of golden euonymous bushes (pre-trimming. In the center is our wonderful batch of tiger lilies. They’re being owned, sadly, by the yellow-ish grasses, so those had to do. The tulips and gladiolas have been pretty sad the last year or two as well, so everything had to go, excepting the shrubs and and tiger lilies.
Friday morning, I started work on the left porch bed, and it was a bit of a breeze, really. Weeded it out with a hoe, then turned it over with the rototiller. I turned my attention to the right bed. I started weeding it out.
That was when I realized the depth of my problem with the yellow grasses. They were going to take over the whole bed within another couple of years. So I started trying to take those out. Hmmm. The hoe wasn’t going to cut it. More to the point, the hoe was bouncing off. I didn’t want to use the pickaxe, because I don’t want lots of left over bits for this thing to spring back to life with. So a shovel it was. There went two hours of my day, cutting some “grasses” the size of a love seat from the right hand bed.
By the time I’d actually cleared the bed all the way around, it was about 3 PM. I figured I could “hit the ground running” with the rototiller after shopping this morning (Saturday), and get the whole thing done by around 3 PM. So I spent an hour transplanting some of the tiger lilies into the tree bed on the left side of the yard, and called it a day.
I did the shopping this morning (off my usual Sunday, but I’ve got to go to work tomorrow for an indeterminate period of time), got home, took the dog for a leisurely walk, and changed into the yard clothing. Out came the rototiller, and I attacked the final bed. The ground attacked back, and won! It’s partly due to how dry things are here (we’re really short on rain this spring), and other than a few specific areas, much of that bed hasn’t been touched in 7 years. Sigh. Out comes the pickaxe, there goes two hours.
I amended the broken up bed with some leaf compost, and turned it with the rototiller. I tuned up all of the beds with a landscaping rake, applied the mulch to all of the appropriate places in the yard …
Wait, did I just say all? One more piece of bad news. Unlike topping up the mulch from year to year, this time I pulled it all out and refreshed the whole yard. Well, the whole yard except for the bit on the back of the tree bed on the left side of the yard. I had 25 bags of mulch. That’s 50 cubic feet, and I came up short by about a bag and a half. But from the street it looks great, and I’m bloody tired.
Here’s what some of it looks like:
Transplanted tiger lilies in the tree bed
The right porch bed, after
With a bit of the old clicky-clicky, you can see that I’ve already added some new decorative grasses to the right porch bed. They’re spiky and non-invasive. In a year or two they’ll do a nice job of providing a bit of backdrop for whatever I plant there.
Now it’s nearly time to sleep, but first to walk the mutt. Ciao!
