Its time to tell the garden that nap time is over

Its never too late to show your yard who is boss.

I decided that it was my turn to be in charge and since I was in charge, we were going to make some changes. Change the first, the yard needed to be mowed  the back yard needed to be mowed. The front yard also needs to be mowed but I don't want to start a precedent out there because once you start to mow the yard you are going to have to keep mowing the yard and then if you are going to mow the yard you are also going to need to clip the hedges and do the edging and I'm not ready to go there.

So instead I turned my attention to the back yard where my gardens live. My garden's are much more interesting than lawn mowing and hedge trimming. Garden "S". There is the traditional garden, the outer garden, the to-be-constructed bean tee-pee location TBA, the potato cubby, the watermelon patch location TBA, and the  wall o' sunflowers.

I've got big plans and a small yard.

But I needed to get as much whipped in to shape as I could before the weather decides to be all March and yucky again. I needed to get some stuff done and I wasn't afraid to use every piece of garden equipment I own.

First there was weed whacking, then mowing at the highest setting, then mowing at the lowest setting and then tilling. I love my tiller. I didn't take any before and after pictures because  I inadvertently blocked my way out of the yard when I was moving stuff around pre-mowing and I blocked my point of egress.

The future wall'o' sunflowers.

It turns out that sunflowers, specifically the giant kind I am going to plant are not quite as easy as I thought. They are not like planting green beans, my only other experience with starting a plant by seed. It turns out there is a lot of work involved with sunflowers that I did not expect.

I would have just made a little hole, dropped a couple of seeds in and went on to the next one on down the row -  and in a few weeks, soul crushing sunflower failure. As it turns out, nothing having to do with the really big sunflowers is little. The big plants need a big hole, preferably, a big trench to grow up in to big plants. I did not know this.  I don't see myself digging a trench or a two foot hole for each plant, as suggested in another tutorial. I wonder I can rent some sort of residential grade trench digger? Nothing too big, I'm not looking to make a play for the county water gig, but I'll need to do something to give the plants their best possible chance that does not include me digging either a massive trench in our clay soil or digging multiple two foot holes in that same clay. Neither choice sounds like fun, I think I'll watch more tutorials and maybe I'll learn about other planting options.

Everything else looks by comparison pretty easy. I'll need to get the drip hoses and the weed barrier down and I need to get the outer garden raked and leveled and there is the matter of the bean tee-pee, but at least I got some of the work done and I reasserted who is in charge.

And I found  my "planters" for the foot of my front walk! They don't look like much but I think they are going to be really nice with some flowers flowing out of them and no one will think they need to steal them either, an issue with something pretty so far from the safety of the patio. These are too ugly and too heavy to casually walk away with. I go the idea from the class I went to a Logans, although they talkign about how you can make a vertial garden with these, I just saw "planter".