Thinning down

No, not me. Though this home improvement task did cause quite a high level of exertion so I wouldn't be surprised if I sweated out some water weight. Our front garden had seen quite a bit of growth this summer. In fact, it was getting a little out of control. When we first bought this house, I had no idea how hard it would be to keep up with gardening. Not that I have to do it all the time, but it takes a lot more work than I thought. As exampled today when I spent 4 hours weeding and thinning out the ground covering greenery in front. Our back area doesn't get hardly any sunlight, so I haven't even had to weed out there. We are planning to fix up the back much more thoroughly next spring so we can have a fun area to entertain, but that shall have to wait at this point, especially with J and I being so busy this fall. Back to the most recent task... As can be seen from the picture below, things were getting a little overgrown.

So, today, I did the following:
1. Thinned out the monkey grass on both sides of the walkway but focused mostly on the left hand side
2. Removed the no longer flowering lilies, saving the bulbs and bulb offspring(?). I can only imagine that this is what happened because 6 lilies were planted, and I now have much more than 6 bulbs (10 I think). My mom told me how to store them over the winter by first letting the leaves die out and then wrapping the bulbs in a brown bag.
3. Weeded (which was needed due to the high amount of rain we have been getting)
4. Mulched areas of exposed dirt or high levels of mini-weeds

I also have added some mums in the front in honor of autumn. I hope to put out some pumpkins soon too. I love fall!

Anyway, below shows the results of this afternoon's gardening effort.

I have to thank J for helping me with the last bag of mulch because I got too worn out to spread it and also for the volunteers at home depot who helped me get the mulch in my cart and then into my car (wet mulch = really heavy).

I would still like to thin out the right side a little more, but maybe in the spring? It's hard to get up the grass without also hitting tree roots. That's all for now!