Wow, ten to fifteen minutes of yardwork is enough to do me in. I just finished cutting back the dead apple mint stalks along the driveway. I'd started that Thursday and had intended to finish it yesterday before I got hit by bad timing spoon expenditures. Once I'd finished the mint, I spent some time trying to clear space around the iris bulbs. We've got some very aggressive ground cover in that little strip of dirt, and last year none of the iris managed to bloom. Some barely managed leaves. I'm hoping that, if I keep pulling up the groundcover right around the bulbs, they'll recover and even spread.
I probably ought to thin the ground cover, too. It starts to look very ugly in the late summer when it gets thick enough that the ground can't support it. At that point, most of it dies back. It's not supposed to die in August, though. It's supposed to last until we get frost.
My good intentions on the iris may not last, though. Weeding around them requires getting down on the ground. I either have to sit on my stool and bend in half or get down on the pavement. Today, I chose bending because getting up from the ground is hard. If I were working in one spot, sitting on the ground might be okay. With needing to move, I'd end up having to choose between crawling from place to place and hurting myself by getting up and down repeatedly.
I think the pineapple sage in the raised bed is dead. I'm going to cut it back and see if it sprouts, but I don't think it will, and I won't wait for it long. I think all the other sage plants survived. I expected the older ones to, but I wasn't sure about the three new ones. The first winter seems to be the hardest.
The winter savory looks like it needs pruning. I'm not sure yet how much is truly dead and how much is still winter quiescent. It hasn't been that long since we had snow. I'm pretty sure the plants survived. They're in the middle of the bed and are quite hardy.
I still don't know about the rue and the Chinese ginger. I transplanted both last September, so they may not have had enough time to root well before it got really cold. Also, the Chinese ginger is borderline for this zone. I wasn't sure that the cold and snow wouldn't do it in. It was doing better than I'd hoped up until March, but it's not looking so good now. I'm afraid the last couple of snows were hard on it.
We still have one more raised bed to build. We don't know if we have enough bricks for it, but I'm sure we have enough so that the front can match the other two beds. Also, it'll be on the other side of the front steps, so any differences won't be quite as obvious (I hope). Scott's father is supposed to help us out with that. I hope it happens soon so that I have all summer to get whatever I plant there established.
Half of that bed will be in fairly full sun, and half of it will only get a few hours of sun a day. That should make planning interesting. Originally, we'd intended to make it a small bed, but we yanked out the last old bush and will put a bed all along that side of the steps. That means that planting lemon balm is probably a bad idea. I wouldn't mind it taking over a small bed. It smells nice and needs almost no work, but I'm not sure I want that much of it.
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