Spring Cleaning

Spring cleaning is probably the Phactor's least favorite activity, all the debris, all the leaves, all the pruning, all the crap you have to get out of your garden to make way for the new growth. But this is also the season when field work starts. None of these garden cleanup jobs is much fun, but the worst, nastiest, job is pruning the damned roses. Why do such pretty flowers have to grow on such ugly, thorny crappy plants? So these past two days have been nearly non-stop pruning and cleaning up aerial parts of herbaceous perennials, and cleaning up all the leaves that escaped last fall. The big problem is simple, a garden's the size of ours are a big cleanup problem. How great are those woodland perennials that know how to deal with leaves. In this regard some newcomer's (wild ramp, jacob's ladder, and others) are showing up with vigor, maybe enough to offset loses (blue cohosh).