Cleanup: quick clips

It's about 20ºF warmer today than it should be: 80ºF instead of 60ºF, and the same for tomorrow. This means two things: 1) I should be seeing more bamboo shoots, and 2) I need to do some more cleanup. Just a small area today:

This is an area where Pink Primrose grows. It spreads pretty quickly, but dies back some years and spreads again, so it never really gets out of hand. It originally was planted on the ground below this small raised planting bed ("box" as I call them), then it moved up into the box one year and died out below, then it moved back down out of the box.

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There's also some dianthus next to the box, and in the box is Salvia nemerosa 'East Friesland', and "Jupiter's Beard". Behind the small rock wall is another Russian sage and some oregano. It's quick work to clean that area up.

I've realized that there are dozens of "Globe Thistle" -- Echinops banaticus 'Blue Glow' -- seedlings everywhere.

Normally I would try to dig these up and pot them, for transplanting later somewhere else. I won't do that now. I've got plenty of these already and they're way too close together to easily dig up (although I could probably get a few), so I'll just thin them out a bit.

The problem is they have tap roots. Those that are too hard to pull I'll just cut down and try to keep on top of that during the year so the plants will eventually exhaust their food reserves and die. OK, that probably won't happen, and the photo of this area next year will look even worse than it does now. It's early in the season though, and I still have the best intentions and am full of optimism.

Besides the Globe Thistle and oregano that are both trying to take over this area, there is a nice sedum called 'Vera Jameson'.

Mine never turns burgundy as described everywhere, so maybe it's misidentified. I moved it here temporarily a couple of summers ago when I converted a perennial bed into a bamboo bed, and it seems to be OK, so I'll leave it. It's a floppy sedum for me though, so it gets a little leggy later in the year. The house finches love eating the leaves too, which makes it look a little tattered with all of the little triangular bite marks out of them. So a little out-of-the-way part of the garden seems like a good choice for it. I'll let it fight it out with the oregano.

So that's about it, except as I was walking back to the garage I saw this on the deck stairs:

It took me a little while to figure out what it was. From up close you can tell (can you?) that it's a dead leaf -  probably an Elephant Ear leaf. From a little further away though, it looks more like something an animal coughed up, or even part of an animal. I'm glad it's just a leaf.

I left it there. Deck cleanup isn't on the schedule today.



How long did it take?  about 30 minutes
Total time spent on clean-up so far this year: 13:00 (13 hours)