Productive weekend

(EDIT: From Flickr: “..some of our image caches flaked out on us, which caused all sorts of weirdness on the site. And not good weirdness, either.” So I guess I’ll leave the photo for now, and hope it turns back into a rosebush soon.)

So, Saturday the garden went in. Yesterday morning I went to a free rose pruning seminar at the nursery down the street, and yesterday afternoon I went out and pruned the roses. I’m glad I went to the seminar; I learned a lot, and think I did a much better job pruning the roses than I’d have done otherwise.

They sure needed it. Here’s a picture of one I took a few months ago:

And here’s what it looks like now:

I probably should have pruned them even more, actually…

This afternoon I went out to clean up the mess I’d made pruning (rose bush bits all over the place) and after I’d been out there a few minutes, Dave joined me. He pulled up all of the weeds around the rose bushes and citrus trees–an impressive quantity! I’d had to pull them away from the base of the roses just to get my pruning done (in fact, one rose bush was so covered in a vine–which I later learned was jasmine–that I couldn’t find it at first!) but he really cleared them out of the whole fence border garden that someone many years ago had bordered with bricks. It looks very nice now. Relative to what it looked like before, anyway.

He said he wanted to make a border around his rosemary and thyme plants, so I suggested he use some of the bricks that were piled up in the corner of the yard, and I think the result is quite lovely. While he continued to pull weeds, I also went to work on a border–I put a narrow path of bricks around the raised bed, so that when it gets wet and muddy in the next few months, I won’t have to walk in a bunch of muck to tend the garden. I think it looks kinda cool, too.

But boy are we beat.