Recent Gardening Tasks

Since I know you guys are dying to know how my gardening is going, I thought I'd tell you and post some pictures. Here's a list of the tasks Livy and I have accomplished recently:

• We mowed the grass for the first time this spring. This might sound easy, but that is because you don't know my policy about spring "weeds." I don't mow them until they are finished blooming. See, I hate yards. Grass is stupid. So I let mine go to weeds. And weeds are a pain and have to be mowed just like grass, but at least they bloom with pretty tiny flowers. So, I let the weeds bloom, and we enjoy the smells and the sight of that carpet of flowers. Then I mow for the first time, and it takes like 6 hours. Yuck.


• We weeded around the daylilies and the dahlias and the lilac bush and the Carolina Jessamine vine and any other plant just starting its springtime climb up from the soil. I also took a couple of minutes to wind the Carolina Jessamine into the chain link fence. I'm trying to train it to cover the whole side of the fence eventually.


Daylilies:


Carolina Jessamine (about to bloom):




We planted two pots of creeping phlox to sit on the church potluck table on the back porch.






We added soil to the potatoes that had grown 4 in. shoots. I was afraid I had killed off all the potatoes somehow, but now several pots have robust growth. I even found a few sprouts today in the pots I had almost given up on.
This is one of the pots where the stems grew up tall, and I covered them again. If you compare this picture to the day I planted them, you can see how much more dirt is filled in.




We kept the seeds of our spring garden wet. Everything has sprouted (beets, carrots, arugula, lettuce, spinach, and a mesclun lettuce mix), but the mesclun mix is really winning the race to our plates.

Blurry carrots:



Mesclun mix:




We cut the dead growth off of our fountain grass. We are gonna mulch with all that good straw, and we found dahlias popping up underneath the fountain grass.


We watered the onions, which are absolutely perfect. I would have grown them before if I knew they would be this easy.

And finally, my loropetalum. I just love this thing. Gorgeous reddish leaves all year long and pink blooms in the spring. And I love the shape as well, which is its natural shape, with no odious clipping.