French country cottage garden: preparing the flower beds

we bought this farmhouse in the French Countryside in 2018 we have spent the past 5 years turning it into our family's dream home we turned the Stables into a holiday Cottage and are currently renovating the barn to turn it into our family's home oh and we also built a cabin in the farmfield which we never planned but we thought was such a great idea but to do all these building projects and modernize the house we've had to completely destroy the garden that was here we installed a new septic tank plumbing for the cabin which means that I have only started to look at gardening since 2021 the first year our garden was beautiful the flower beds were beautiful and I thought if it's going to be like this every year I am going to be so happy but quite honestly I have struggled in the past two 2 years to make the flower bed look nice so in today's video I am going to try something new to hopefully make the flower bed look nice again this summer and apart from that I have been enjoying the holidays visit from friends and family so I haven't been able to film anything else so this entire video is going to be about the gardening it's extremely warm today I don't know it's probably 12° or something and I've been waiting for a day like this I want to attack the as they say in French attack the flower bed here and I was just saying to Olaf okay I'll go do it although I really don't know what I need to be doing I know there was dalas here in this area that I need to dig out and what I want to do really is just remove all of this I have decided in the previous two three years to leave everything also because it offers nice little hiding places for animals and insects but it is a lot of work in the spring to prepare the bed you know I had two people helped me last year that came in Spring and they said why don't you just take everything out before the winter put mulch or even cardboard on it and then it won't you won't have all the weeds in the spring and it will be easier to sew new seeds in the spring so that is my plan to just try see how that works [Music] for for now this one here is um I have no clue what the name is in English but it's the kind of Hedges that grow everywhere here around the farm field so I'm going to try to dig this one out because we want to create a hedge from our garden to the driveway that we created last spring and this looks like the kind of thing that would do really well there and grow quite naturally and create a nice closed Hedge for us plus I'm also thinking this whole bed is where our septic tank system is that is why we created these flower beds so that it would be nice and covered um and you wouldn't see all the hatches but this might actually have two Deep Roots also to be growing here um I don't think it's a good idea it's a rock cuz it might be too deep and then damage the um the plowing see it's already quite deep and if I kill it this will be easy to recreate cuz this goes everywhere here I don't want to go too deep because of all the plumbing that is here it's very deep I can tell and this I hate this this grows everywhere it takes over the entire Garden some of you have said uh oh that's poison ivy be careful poison ivy doesn't grow in Europe so it's not that don't worry you can touch this and you'll be fine this not sure if I can get this out and I don't even know how it end it up here come on we'll just have to kill your roots then okay I'm going to be really honest with you I absolutely hate doing this um I know a lot of you on this channel like gardening and a lot of you have given me so much wonderful advice when you see me struggle in all these videos so I really really appreciate that the thing is though that for example with the dalas then I watched seven YouTube videos then I go to my garden and then it just doesn't happen then in the same way so I feel so insecure about how to do things and I think I'll mess things up and and bottom line is I just don't enjoy it at all that is why Olaf takes care well you can't see it but here's where the kette the zucchini are and the Greenhouse he built that he really enjoys growing vegetables I do not enjoy it I enjoy harvesting from the garden and cooking with it but I don't like I just don't like this kind of work but I guess it comes with owning a house like this and this lifestyle and I've told myself I just need to I just need to learn how to do this and then maybe when I learn cuz I'm somebody that likes to take action straight away so I just want to start doing and when I don't know what I need to be doing I get very frustrated last year I had two wonderful people that helped me and they went oh just do this next year and I was like oh that's a good idea but now it is next year and they said oh just put cardboard on it and they won't have weeds and I'm like but how what do I do with what's in the bed do I kill it do I remove it what do I do and then I watch YouTube videos and then people say don't don't put cardboard in just put mulch in well what mulch then I have a lot of things here that I could cut but I don't know if there's seeds in there and I don't know I just don't like it I just I just don't like it I'm good at other things I'm a very talented person this is just not one of my talents it's the thing is it doesn't come naturally I can learn everything of course I can learn everything but but I don't like doing things that don't naturally feel like I intuitively know what to do and gardening is one of those things where I don't intuitively know what to do what I'm going to do now is at least finish clearing this bed cuz that's the strategy I chose whether that's right or not I will put cardboard on this to try I won't put it on the vegetable bed because I'm not sure there is not chemicals and glue and I don't want that in the food I grow edible flowers here but nobody eats them when I serve them to our guests people just cuz they always I always find them on the plate so it's just for serving so that's fine but like a whole zucchini grown on a cardboard with chemicals I don't know I don't know how much of that disappears and what I wanted to do like in my head I wanted to create a beautiful Dalia and Zena bed here cuz my American aunt gave me the zenyas that my American Grandmother always had in her garden my mom and dad were in the US and they brought back this whole bag of zenas seeds from Grandma's zenas that I want to plant here and dalas cuz they look really nice together and uh so this will be a flower picking garden and maybe some Cosmos because that was they were very late this year but they're easy to grow is what I've seen so then this will be my flower picking bed and I've I've selected all these really gorgeous colors that I want to buy but I found this let me show you cuz maybe you know where are they now see this this is what I dug up I don't know if these are the only dalas that I've been able to find I'm going to do some more digging I don't even know if they're dalas but I think they are because they were in the spot where my dalas were so I'm going to cut the edges here and these I think and then dry them or wrap them in newspaper or what do you do with them I like the ones that came out but not as much as the ones that I've seen online so I'm thinking to buy new ones and then put them in in the spring uh I just don't know what color Grandma zenyas are they might be a completely different color anyway I'm going to continue just send me some good vibes to finish this is for for for [Music] in okay I'm calling it a day I know that I would need to put some organic material on here now either soil or leaves or uh branches or mulch but unfortunately I have already taken all my leaves to the um we call it the Green Dump could potentially drive back there and scoop them all up again and put them on here that's a lesson for next year yeah I'm proud of myself for at least completing this task I've put stones on so I don't blow away and uh with the rain that's coming it will be wet I've read somewhere that you need to wet them anyway thank you for watching and keeping me company I kept seeing to myself at least I have the feeling that I'm not doing this alone because I'm filming part of this that's pathetic I know but that's how it feels