Every Year It's the Shovel

Every year I end up with digging to do. I avoid sweeping but I can't skip digging. Some years it was getting truckloads of compost delivered. The truck will dump it exactly where I ask, so I learned to put a big tarp down in the driveway and let him dump onto that.

I remember one year when I made up a flower bed and then was concerned that I had nothing to plant in it to keep it from growing weeds. I lifted lily of the valley from the north of the house where it has grown in narrow strips between the house and the little sidewalk. And periwinkle. Of course, this year that flowerbed is totally overrun with lily of the valley and periwinkle. I never realized how LoV could grow and clump until I put it in well-composted beds with lots of sun.

I can line some daylily beds with LoV, confident that I can mow it, or the neighbor can. But realizing that it'll clump and keep the creeping charlie out. The quantities of both peri and LoV that I'm putting out for the waste collection appalls me when I think of how much people charge for them in catalogs.

Periwinkle I throw under the ramp, this year. One year, I threw it between the garage and the fence. It roots.

Phlox, too. I hate to throw away phlox. This year I invested in two little helenium plants, and was determined they would go in front of the old clothes pole. At least there wasn't any LoV or periwinkle there. But the lemon mint clump that had grown so huge finally defeated me, right back at the fence. I whittled it down by half, and made a deep trench, and put a black trash bag into the trench, set back into the plastic all the bricks I had unearthed, and just left it for this year.

Tomorrow it's going after periwinkle again, unfortunately not mixed up with anything much -- so I have to roll it over and over like a roll of sod because the stuff holds together so well. There's gonna be gladiola against the south of the house rather than that periwinkle, if the shovel doesn't break. One little patch is done, and planted; I did put plastic between the daylilies to the east of it and the new gladiola patch. But then, because it looks so blank with just buried bulbs, I did take some artemisia, two nice plants, and a bunch of little baby honesty plants that I had pulled up from elsewhere, and I set them it to look cheerful. It's really only now that I deeply wonder why I am so inclined to plants that feverishly multiiply. However, in digging out glads, I may be able to keep future artemisia and honesty from totally taking over?

Or not.