Spring cleaning one of my Bearded Iris beds

It is April and this year things are growing early for Central Oregon. Todays project was to get the old Bearded Iris leaves cleaned out of this flowerbed…. Because the location of this Iris bed gets more sunlight than the other 5 locations it starts blooming earlier. I have also noticed that my peonies are coming up, so not only do I have to remove the old iris leaves but the old peony leaves and the various different seed heads from last years flowers… Some are still standing in this photo in the background.

It all started out as planned, reach out grab a handful of old leaves and toss them into a pile for the compost pile. But… that only lasted a few minutes. When I put in the raised beds for the Peonies and the Virginnia Creepers, I made the fenceline side of those beds with cinder blocks, after replacing and changing the location of the new fence last year, I decided to remove part of the old fence. This year I decided those cinder blocks were ugly and pulled them. (back left side of photo) My plan was to replace them with more large rocks… Central Oregon has a lot of those, and I don’t have to go far to get the new rocks for this project since I have a lot of rocks close by. I have a couple of other rock borders that I want removed and it is a perfect use for those rocks.

Now that I have placed the new rocks in the area between the peony flowerbed and the Bearded Iris flowerbed, it is time to finish cleaning up the old leaves. Wait I haven’t photographed my work yet…. And while I am at it I need to include the gnomes and the trolls.

I wonder why it takes me so long to finish a project……