I have a vision for my flower beds.

In my mind they look like this……..

Organized chaos of color bordered by weed-free mulch, nestled around my home like a quilt of yellow, purple, orange, red, pink and green.  When in reality (since I work full-time, home-school, blog, sell books, have chickens, go to church and run) my flower bed looks like this.

There ARE flowers in there, see them, cowering from the vicious weeds in the back?

My main problem is when I plant something I forget the fact it will GROW.  Okay, so maybe my MAIN problem is weeding, or lack thereof.  Still, the fact remains that when I planted this Lantana 2 years ago it was about a foot wide and very tame.

I think it wants to eat me.

Last year I had to move my roses.  This year I’m gonna have to move my pepper plant and am giving It the whole front.  Apparently It can handle it.

See the poor pepper plant?  Middle of the photo, under the Lantana, little red peppers trying to peek out?  Bless it’s heart.

Rather than leave the outer lying regions of the beds full of dying weeds and dead Zinnas I decided to take action, clean up and plant some winter veggies in the bare spots.

There were a LOT of weeds.

And a LOT of ants.

You can’t see the little demons very well here but they numbered in the thousands and feasted upon my ankles, calves, fingers and wrists.

Then I killed them.

I now have carrots, lettuce, spinach and chard sown in the freshly raked dirt.

Maybe I’ll do better next year.

Maybe.

pretty garden photo-yahoo images

the rest-mine