How we spent Sunday afternoon

 "By doing just a little every day, 

I can gradually let the task completely overwhelm me."
-  Ashleigh Brilliant

We woke up Sunday to yet another beautiful morning, ate blueberry pancakes and slowly went to work. John painted away at the garage doors and I got out the Hori Hori knife. There finally comes a late September day when the dead lily stalks, the flopping daisies, the crocosima, the iris and the brown peonies are cut down to the ground and thrown in the overflowing compost bin.  Then the gardener sees an ugly tangle of weeds and mess that the overgrown foliage covered up all summer. 

Nothing is more exasperating than weedy grass growing up through chopped off stalks, especially iris, and especially when the root ball is hard as cement.  When all is said and done, the only way to get weeds out of an old clump is to dig it up and pull it apart. The dark side of gardening.

These Shasta daisies were hogging up half a bed anyway and needed to be divided. As you know, it has only rained 1/100th of an inch since July, so as far down as I could dig the soil was dry as dust.  I managed to pry out the clump bit by bit, hack it apart, and before I knew it there were enough new starts to replant a half acre with daisies.  I put some in a garbage bag for our neighbor, and planted the rest here and there.

Which pretty much guarantees (providing I can still pick up a shovel) that I'll be doing the same September chore in multiple locations a few years from now. I guess that's called job security.