Garden Care

If there's one thing I neglected during the school year even more than my housework, it's my garden.  I felt really bad about it, but I simply did not have the energy to spare.  That is, until this past Tuesday!  As every morning, I got  up with Bryan at around 5:45 am and fixed his lunch and made him oatmeal (instant--the best kind! lol) and saw him off to work.  Normally, at this point, I would have gone back to bed for a few hours, but on Tuesday I just couldn't bring myself to lay back down.  My theory is that my body knew that I SHOULD have been going to water aerobics at 9, but since the truck is still out of commission, Bryan had my car.

So, I decided to actually work in my garden!  I gathered all of my things together from the various places they had ended up since my last gardening exploit and started working about 7:30 am.

Before I got started, the weeds were out of control.

My bottle brush plants had taken off, and while I was glad to see them growing in such an--enthusiastic--fashion, they really were quite out of control.  The same could be said for my loropetalums.  The bush in the front--I still don't know it's name--also needed some pruning.

The first thing I did was prune all of the above.  As I picked up the trimmings, I also weeded.  For the most part, that went smoothly.  Except for the three--THREE!--large growths of poison ivy I found!  That was disturbing--I hate that little three-leaved plant.  I got them up, roots and all, so hopefully they won't make a reappearance.  I also got the vine-grass that was growing by the mini-gardenias--that stuff has DEEP roots!

It took two hours of steady working.  Of course, I had only planned for an hour, so I got a late start on preparing the Sweet and Tangy Chicken, but overall the front gardens look much better, if I do say so myself!  But don't get me started on the back gardens...sigh.