For the past two weeks I have been slowly cleaning out the flower beds. Everyday I pull weeds, clean up spent lilies, dead head the butterfly bush flowers, cut off spent roses and clean up the wildflower garden as much as I can. I like to leave the dead blooms on the black eyed susan’s and coneflowers for the birds over the winter. I’ve done all this while the weather was still hot. I would take Ellie out and do a little bit every day. Sometimes I would bring the weed bucket but most of the time I just piled the weeds on my walker and then put them in the weed bucket, usually leaving a little mess in the garage.

This week Pete is away Savannah and the weather has been in the high 60’s, low 70’s. I started concentrating on specific beds. On Sunday I cleaned up the herb garden. It had almost as many weeds as plants. Unfortunately I didn’t take a before picture but here is the after:

I cleaned up the mostly shade garden bed, (I haven’t named this one so for now this is what I’m going with.) The Bee Balm and Butterfly Weed need more sun and at some point I’ll move them or bring them down to N. Carolina. The Painted Lady Butterfly is so pretty. I was able to get a good picture. The blurriness in the center is not from the camera, it is in fact blurry. I thought that was interesting.