The City Girl's Guide to Country Gardening, Lesson 4: Planting Perennials

As you may remember from Lesson 2 in my gardening series, we inherited about five to ten years of weeds along with our 140-year-old house. And after my triumphant first bed clearing, I admit to losing steam for a few weeks. The border that runs along the west side of our house is a good 30 feet long. That's a lot of dandelions and crab grass to haul out. And I find I need a lot of cookie breaks when I'm doing this kind of work, so progress has been slow.

Here's an in-progress shot, so you can see what we were up against.

See that mess of green in the middle? Yeah, the whole thing looked like that when we started.

But, at last, after two hard labor weekends, we have claimed victory over this bed, clearing away five full-to-bursting garbage bags full of weeds. (I add dead leaves and grass clippings to my compost bin, but am wary of trying to compost weeds lest that just make them stronger... if anyone has good ideas for eco disposal of non-compostable yard trash, do let me know!)