Putting the Garden to Bed.

After frittering away a couple perfectly beautiful weekend days in October I realized it was high time I took care of the fall garden chores. Part of the hesitation was that the flowers in the front were still looking really nice, part of it was dreading the work involved in redoing the lilly bed. A frost last week took care of the flowers - boom black and dead dead dead. Not hard to rip them out then. As for the second, it was optional and I realized that if I really wanted to do it I would just have to suck it up. So that's what I did.

Saturday I did a couple quick errands then got down to business. I pulled dead flowers, weeded then dug the whole garden up. It was a regular treasure hunt for daffodils and lillies and an errant tulip and hyacinth. I put the daylilly clumps in then figured out where I wanted the daffodils. After that it was pretty much random bulb placement. Most of the other bulbs are asiatic lillies, a few yellow and one white but mostly pink in a variety of bulbs and stems that strangely all produce remarkably similar flowers. When they all had spots I added more tulips (that lonely red tulip last year made me uncountably happy so now it has 12 comrades), hyacinths and grape hyacinths. Hopefully everything will come back looking good. Bulbs gardens are all about hope, after all.

Today I cut down the peonies, weeded the other front gardens and laid down a layer of mulch. Had a new weed to contend with, not sure what it is but it is definitely prolific. A real pain to pull up in the shade garden where there are still subtle little growing things (ie the pink flowers in the upper left corner).

I'm beat, but it's nice to tick a bunch of items off the list. I also did my usual metric ton of laundry, cleaned and put away the deck furniture, stowed the hoses for winter, cleaned my desk, watered the plants, did some mp3 player maintenance and in just a minute or two I'm going to go bake a cake. I still have the back gardens to clean up, but since I wasn't quick enough to get the boy in the one Park and Recs daycare site for election day I can take care of them then.

Hope everyone had a great weekend!