Re-Establishing Flower beds

It's been a little chaotic around here the past couple weeks, but in between the chaos (and the heat....and the mosquitoes that try to eat my face every time I step out the door), I have been hard at work trying to re-establish the flower beds in front of the house. So far, I've got one down (thankfully, the larger of the two), one to go.

If you will recall, the left flower bed looked something like this when we moved in (after I added some gifted plants)

Giant mass of weeds. Yikes. I have to admit, I was really dreading pulling all of them, so I started looking for other ways to get rid of them.

I read somewhere that you could use newspaper as a temporary, cheaper, biodegradable weed cloth under mulch, so I decided to give it a try.

I did pull the worst of the weeds, just so it was easier to lay the newspaper down, and laid down a couple layers of newspaper, soaking them with water as I went so they didn't fly off in any unexpected breezes. Once I got a reasonable-sized area covered, I used pine bark mulch (the cheap stuff....not Scotts brand or anything...that would have gotten expensive in a hurry!!) to cover the newspaper so my neighbors wouldn't talk bad about me haha.

Here's an in-process picture.

When I ran out of newspaper, I decided to take a break. That break turned into a two-week break. Oops. That was about the time the mosquitoes got really bad and started trying to eat us every time we stepped out the door.


This morning I resolved to get back on it. I tried to go to Kroger (which is supposed to open round the clock) to by more newspaper, but they were closed for some reason or another, so on to Home Depot I went for more mulch and to see if they had some kind of paper that might be serviceable. Man, am I glad. Here's what I found.

I'm hoping this stuff will actually work better than newspaper, since it's thicker. Plus, I can use the leftovers on other projects instead of just tossing/recycling whatever is left.

Scissors and giant roll of paper in hand, I got down to business, again, soaking the paper as I went to avoid shifting.

This paper went much faster than newspaper since I didn't have to put down multiple layers or deal with flimsiness.

Then, I mulched, and stood back to admire my handiwork.

The plants that are already here should grow together some. I also have an order in for things like tulip and daffodil bulbs...and a peony!

So now that I've gotten to show off a little, now comes the part where I hang my head in shame and promise to fix this....like tomorrow...

Again. Yikes. Oh, and see E.T. peeking out the basement window? That would be my husband's sense of humor at work.

Any major gardening projects you've been tackling? Any you are dreading/putting off?

Bermuda Grass in the Vegetable Beds

Last summer, I had some serious problems with Bermuda grass getting into my vegetable beds (mostly just in one, but it definitely made its way into both). It seemed like to matter how much I pulled (and I would pull until my hands were red and full of blisters), I still had beds full of bermuda grass....to the point it was killing off my vegetables.

Using weed killer in my vegetable beds seemed like a bad idea, and I eventually ended up giving up on trying to get the horrible stuff completely out of my beds....I contented myself with just keeping them from completely taking over.

Well last week, a friend suggested I take a hoe to it. I'm not sure how well this would work if you had lots of plants around that you wanted to keep, but today, I waged war on that Bermuda grass. I chopped and pulled and chopped and pulled....I dug up the entire raised bed! The bad news is I'm going to be really sore tomorrow from all the chopping and pulling, but the good news is that I think (hope) that I've gotten the grass out of my vegetable bed.

The other good thing about it? My soil is now turned, fluffy and ready for planting!

Flower Bed Before and After

Remember those picture I posted the other day of my sorely neglected, un-mulched flower bed? Well I've given it new life. I took myself outside yesterday in the rather chilly weather and weeded the bed.

Here is what it looked like before...

After I weeded....

And after I mulched (I used the cypress mulch from Home Depot)...

What a difference! Now I just need to find something to put in it! Last year I did a bunch of annuals, and my neighbors gave me the ornamental grass. One of my students gave me a white chrysanthemum back in the fall, so I put that in and cut it to the ground since there was no new growth. I think that's how you're supposed to do it (according to the information I've found online). I guess I'll find out come spring! It'll either grow back or it won't.

I'd really like to put in some perennials  this year, but am unsure where to start with it. This is a north-facing bed, so whatever I put in it has to be ok with shade for part of the day.

What do you put in your partial shade gardens??

Garden To-do's

Seeing as how I'm supposed to have at least a few days of nice, not-freezing weather (in the 50's), I figure I ought to get outside and put myself to work! Here are my plans for the end of the week and weekend:

Weed this flower bed (Look at all those weeds...yikes! I definitely should have put down some mulch last year). Which leads me too....

Mulch the flower beds! If I'm going to go to all the work of weeding those beds, I think I can take some steps to keep the weeds at bay. What kind of mulch do you use for flower beds? Any particular material that plentiful around Nashville?

Remove last year's jalapeno bush. Remember me going on about how enormous it was? Here is a picture of what's left....probably should have pulled this up a while ago....oops.

Get a hoe and break up/turn over the dirt in the raised beds.

Get compost from my friends and mulch that into the veggie beds.

What are you doing to get your garden ready for spring?