Weekend gardening again!

This is the first weekend in a while that it isn't raining, so time to get gardening! After days and days of weeding (about the only thing that you can do when it's raining all the time) I was itching to get out there and do something different. What did I choose to do first?

I weeded.

***

I really didn't want to, but I just couldn't walk past this bed again and not do something about it. There are several groundcover thymes and sedums here, and lots and lots of weeds.

That's the problem with groundcovers: if they're not dense enough to keep any weeds from forming (and I haven't found one that is yet) you're going to do some tedious hand (finger) pulling of weeds. In this bed sorrel is a problem:

So are violets (as they are in every spot of my yard). If I can get them while they're small enough, they come up easily.

Since they're growing up through a "carpet" of plants I want to keep, there's no tool that will make this job easier. You just have to get in there and pull pull pull!

There's a maple seedling (a common sight right now) next to a Miscanthus seedling. I'm seeing more Miscanthus seedlings this year than I have before. Maybe I just wasn't paying enough attention the other years.

After about an hour and a half of work, the bed is relatively weed-free:

You can see that there is a bit of space left for the thymes and/or sedums to fill in. Even if there was no visible ground left to cover, there would still be weeds poking up through the "carpet". I think I will put down some pre-emergent herbicide -- corn gluten for instance. Something tells me that the deer will just eat it though -- does anybody know?

It's been a few weeks, but I caught another mole this morning!

MoleMeter 2010 mole capture count: 05

I also remembered that one of the Elephant Ears (Colocasia esculenta) from last year was still unplanted:

I dug this one out of its container and put it in a bag in the garage for the winter. I wasn't sure if the other Colocasia which I left in pots in the garage would make it, so I wanted to try something different with this one to increase my chances of one of these making it.

Since I can see some evidence of new growth, it looks like this one is going to make it fine too (just like the ones that were left in their pots) so I'll have no shortage of Elephant Ears this year.

I probably should have planted this one a month ago, but I think in a couple of weeks it will be a great mass of green, so no harm done. When it does I'll put it with the half-dozen other pots of Elephant Ears, add a couple of pots of bamboo, and create my own miniature jungle.