Cleanup: Gonna need a rake, a shovel, and a broom

Another lunchtime cleanup job in the nice warm sun! It's time to get the Winter's worth of sunflower seed shells off the driveway, and get that whole area looking better. It's a mess:

Yuck. This is the part of the yard that I look at the most. You think I would have cleaned it up a long time ago.

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Several dead annuals to remove, mixed in with some perennials.

Depending on how efficient I am, I may have time for that miscanthus too. This is a straightforward job: rake up the leaves and loose sunflower seed debris, then switch to a shovel for the older debris that has already broken down (and is like a thin layer of soil on the driveway). The annuals I'll snap a couple of inches above the soil.

I don't just rip them out of the ground because they're mixed in with some perennials, and I don't want to uproot those! Here's one as an example:

Too easy to miss, especially with all of the leaves around. This one is Agastache foeniculum a plant I love for it's leaves that smell like licorice, and the bees love it too (probably not for the way the leaves smell though). It's reseeded throughout my yard.

So once I got those out of the way I can carefully rake up the rest of the leaves and carry everything off to the compost pile.

That didn't take too long, so let's take another look at that grass...

Ok, I'm going for it. Time to grab the loppers and start chopping! Here it is about 1/2 finished:

And here's the finished stump. I guess you don't call it a stump though. What is it called?

You can finally see my Semiarundinaria fastuosa 'Viridis'. About 50% leaf burn, even though it was wrapped. I'm expecting a good size-up from this year's culms, which should start shooting at the end of April.
(I need to mulch this area again.)


How long did it take? 30 minutes
Total time spent on clean-up so far this year: 4:45 (4 hours 45 minutes)

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