With the exception of a little spinning, I spent most of the weekend working in my front garden.  I weeded Friday afternoon and Saturday, pulling out 4 garden refuse bags worth of weeds.  Friday I also bought 15 bags of mulch.  Saturday was the flower giveaway that my condo association does every year.  I got a flat of 1/2 Marigolds and 1/2 Snapdragons:

And a flower box kit for my front window:

Sunday, for about 4 hours, I mulched.  I'm terrible at taking care of my garden when it gets hot outside, which happens during Michigan summers.  The garden usually looks terrible; choked with weeds.  This year I thought I'd do a preemptive strike on the weeds.  So, I in the open areas of my garden, I laid down 4 layers of newpaper and covered that with 3 or so inches of mulch.

You can see some newspaper peeking out from the far side of the mulched area.  Oh, before I mulched, I planted the flowers I got Saturday:

I also planted the red Dianthus I bought during a quick run to Lowe's for potting mix for the flowerbox.  I have a gorgeous red lilly that I planted 2 years ago and some Correopsis that come back every year so that let me to planting a red/yellow color scheme.  You can't see them very well, but there are Snapdragons behind the Marigolds.  Hopefully, they'll be either red or yellow.

I didn't get the whole thing mulched because I ran out of newspaper, plus I need another 3 or 4 bags of mulch to finish it off.  The tricky part of future weeding will be around the plants since I couldn't easily get newspaper in there before the mulch went down.  We shall see later this summer how the weeding goes.

Still, it looks pretty good with its fresh coat of mulch.  I'll need more plants to fill in the holes once all the daffodils die back.  My neighbor gave me a volunteer Foxglove that you can see in the lower left corner of the picture above.  Now I just need more newspapers...

Comments

[gayle]

Hopefully all this work now will save you oodles of time over the summer. Yay for more spinning and playing-with-kitties time!