What I finally finished!

All last week, and almost all day yesterday I worked on digging up my front flower bed.

Now you have to understand what a HUGE mess this flower garden was. I got some nasty, nasty weed in it that thought it should be totally invasive. Killed my dianthus, killed some other plants and just a nasty, nasty weed.

This weed has been the subject of many a conversation.
1. to find out what it is -- this stymied a couple of master gardeners who kept thinking what I was describing was bindweed or creeping charlie. And I would say no...I know how to deal with those nasty weeds. And they would argue with me! :) fun in retrospect, frustrating at the time.
2. to figure out how to kill it -- since I have it in other spots of the yard I tried a variety of ways of killing it. Roundup mixed properly. Roundup full strength. Covering up it really solid and lets no light through (kills many a weed that does). Digging it up. Screaming at it. Painting it directly on the leaves (the round up). and so forth. NO SUCCESS. I was hesitant to round up the entire front garden because I had a few plants growing in there that I was not really wanting to destroy in the process So...

That comes to my solution....DIG IT UP!

So...I worked on it when my boyo was sleeping. I worked on it while my boyo was "helping". Discovered that this nasty, nasty plant has a tap root that goes down at least a foot and a half. And off that tap root grow runners (like what you get with twitch grass). NASTY PLANT!!!! (have you gotten the point of how nasty this plant/weed is?)

Do I think I got it all? No... because after digging down a foot and a half I didn't reach the bottom of the plant and was hitting gravel. Not my idea of easy to dig through. GAVE UP (on digging the tap root out)! I did what I could. Got most everything out. and then replanted. I have a TON of bulbs! All my daffodils and tulips and "walk on ables" have nicely multiplied and have been divided. We even bought a few news bulbs to add more variety to the garden, pink daffys, purple and white tulips, anemones, allium, some other tulips. Fun, fun!

Anyways, this is the end result. Hopefully in the spring that nasty weed will be a bit easier to control as I took lots of rocks out of the garden. It looks SO much better. Even my hubbie said "looks good hun". And hopefully in the spring I'll remember to take a picture so you can see how nice it all turned out. :)