Garden Cleanup- Cutting Back Iris, Peonies, Sweet Peas, Saving Seeds, and Weeding 🌿😁🧹

Hey guys, welcome back. Today we are going to be working out in the backyard and we are going to get some areas cleaned up. I don't know what got over me today, like in the last hour, but I just feel like this burst of energy and excitement to come out into the garden. I don't know why. It has been raining all day and it started raining last night, like late in the evening. I was sprinkling this morning and it's just been like a very gentle rain but the garden looks so lush and green and fresh and it's kind of warm out here but it's cloudy. I don't know. I don't know where this energy is coming from but I'm gonna roll with it because I do want to come out here and get after a couple of areas in the garden because I'd like to come in probably like in a week or two and start thinking about what we're going to be planting in these areas. Things are looking a little bit messy so I want to get after it before it gets too out of control and things start to self-seed everywhere where which they have already some but anyways let me just show you those areas that we're going to be working in today. First off, look at my poor dahlia. It broke. This one broke and this one broke during the storm because guess who didn't stake up their dahlias in the landscape? Raising my hand because I didn't. So I'm gonna come in, cut that back. It's totally fine. It will grow again so I'm not worried about it. It was just kind of a bummer and I actually saw it on the camera just like slowly and well there we are. So anyways the areas that I want to focus on today is really kind of by the fence because you can see our sweet peas are pretty much done for the season. There are some that look okay but for the most part I just want to get rid of all of this business over here just because it's getting really muggy. Almost feels like muggy back there. There's not enough airflow. I just want to pick up all of these dead things around the back over here and same with this side. I've just been kind of ignoring it but it's an eyesore. Let me tell you I was in the cut flower garden last night and my eyes just immediately kept going to this area and I'm like please come out here Claudia and get after these things. It's just getting a little bit unruly and same with back here. Now usually by this time all of our sweet peas are gone but these are still going which is a surprise and I will say we will have to come in and do another layer of paint because this is chipping off which is kind of weird how it's chipping off like that. Kind of like a weird pattern and I don't think it's all of them so I don't know if this was like an animal that did this because it's not. Yeah it's just this one over here which is a little odd and if it doesn't rain I want to come back here and also clean up some of this area right here in the very far corner of our garden. You can see the weeds are taking over. Look at this. Look at the situation. It's everywhere and they're getting bigger and bigger so I'm gonna get after it. Okay and don't judge but look back here in the dry river. Look at that. I actually got out of control. Sergey and I have both been avoiding this area but we really do need to get after it because we need to start thinking about when we're going to start trenching this area a bit to create that retaining wall because what happened is when we had the drywall installed over here there's a huge drywall right over there. It's like 15 feet deep I think. I don't know but anyways all of these rocks are now being covered by our mulch and what happens is in the winter time our drainage it's still well it's improved dramatically after we leveled our entire garden. If you guys recall probably what was it like three or four years ago none of this was here. It was all just everything was removed and we leveled everything off and graded things but even now it still starts to pool and so we need to make sure that this path is cleaned up and we start scooching some of this mulch back and probably bring in more rocks to this space. This is going to be one of those projects that it's not going to be so fun to do but I think it will make a big difference in how the water drains in our garden long term especially because we are putting in a french drain in the side garden that's going to connect to some of the spouts that come out to the drywall so it's one of those things in the garden that it's not as fun to do but it makes a difference in how the overall health of your garden is if that makes sense because it just gets so swampy back here even after doing the grading and all of that just because our neighborhood like it steps down so like the house next to us is above us we're above the house below us etc it's just one of those like infrastructure things that's not perfect so anything that we can do to improve it is what we are trying to do so it's not as wet back here in the winter months. I will say this star jasmine back here smells delightful like I just planted this I think it was last year and I need to come and tie it up and I just tied it against this post and I asked for us if that was okay to do I can't get too tall but this is fine we actually thought about burying all of our lines but because this is not our forever home it was going to be an enormous undertaking that we were just like maybe not so we're just trying to disguise it as best as we can so let's come in here and start to clean some of this up I also want to cut back some of our peonies that should have been done way long ago but you know what it's it is what it is but you see how they've gone to seed so definitely want to come in and prune these off for sure today and just get some of this area cleaned up we do have foxglove I think this is a dalmatian oh gosh what is the variety something dalmatian and it went to seed and I kind of just want to spread it all over the garden now if I do that you guys will have to remind me next spring that you did this I asked for it and hold me accountable because it's one of those things that it seeds everywhere in fact I think in our flower bed one of our flower beds I think I planted this like two years ago and it's still popping up everywhere but I really do want them to just kind of pop up randomly throughout the garden because you're so beautiful especially in the springtime so if I do it just remind me if I complain about it like you wanted this you did this to yourself so don't let me forget that we're doing this ourselves so anyways let me go ahead we're gonna need some gloves my pop-up bag our hands and some let's see what else we need some pruners I can't find a single garden glove I don't know where they are so these will have to do it feels very odd to have rain this early in August but I'll tell you what I feel like the garden needed it there's nothing that waters your garden quite as good as there as like a rainfall it doesn't look like it so let me just stake this I'm gonna pop it up like this for a second we'll come back and stake that up you know how people don't like to waste food I know I don't but I also don't like to waste flowers so I will make an arrangement with some of these vines before we pull up some of these sweet peas I'm going to harvest some of the seeds so we don't have to buy any next year so this is how you save your sweet pea seeds I'm going to pull a few pods for you guys to see let's do this one too all right so here is kind of the evolution of your sweet pea pods so from youngest to oldest and so you can see that this is still very green so if you're to open this up these sweet peas are not going to be ready they're still way too green so you can't really save these next are going to be these these feel a little bit firmer but they're still very green and you can see so are the seeds see that and then these are starting to feel a lot harder and actually these might be good to go do you see how they're nice and firm and dark and these two are probably at the same stage there you go do you see how nice and dark and firm these are so these you can save for several several years and so I like to harvest my own sweet peas that way you don't have to buy too many of them during seed buying season and if you end up not harvesting seeds and you leave your plants what's going to happen is they're going to pop open like this one has right here and they'll self-seed so a lot of these self-seeded last year for us we garden in zone 8b so these were almost like a fall sown plant and they were super vigorous which we will sow some sweet peas in the fall this year but anyways I just wanted to show you guys how we collect our sweet pea seeds some of these have already popped open so these self-seeded already and then these I will just save I will open up the seed pods put them in an envelope and then save them until I'm ready to start them again in the fall time and honestly saving seeds is such a fun and relaxing process it's just one of those garden chores that I actually do enjoy to do so I'm just going to like cut this and set it aside and harvest some more seeds from it we don't need a ton but in case anybody wants some I'll have extra to share so I'm just going to save these seed pods on this whole stalk here and then once we have everything cleaned up I'll just come and just literally sprinkle it like this they're just a bunch of little seeds flying out and we'll do that all over the garden it's gonna be great or it's gonna be terrible I don't know yet okay the pop-up bag is full of sweet peas we have all of these sweet peas we still have some vines left but after going to see Maren and seeing like 40,000 sweet peas on her farm we just did a tour there a few weeks ago if you guys watched that video but anyways this makes me so sad to see this imagine how she must feel like I would cry this is this is so sad it's like losing the dahlias it's just I don't know it's like part of part of the process but seeing these vines like this I'm like that's it that's that for the season luckily we still have some left but what a huge pile we've created and just the little amount of sweet peas that we grew this year that's incredible this is one of my favorite garden tools is this little broom yes I sweep my garden okay so what I like to do instead of raking it because this has more of a gentle pull I will blow everything to a corner and just gently sweep up all of the debris that way I'm not taking a lot of the compost and the mulch so just make a little pile and then we'll come in and pick them up so yes I do sweep my garden all right guys I am going to cut the video short my mom just came out and she said she's not feeling good so I'm going to take her to urgent care but I did want to show you guys what we got done we got quite a bit done not as much as I would have liked but still progress today so if I swing back here you can kind of get an idea of how much better everything looks I ended up leaving some of the sweet peas just because they're still flowering and I would love to arrange with these for maybe like another week or so so some of the vines I left behind but do you see how much neater that is and how open and decongested things are I mean it's still it's still congested because you know how I am implanting uh densely but better than it was before I still need to come back and stake up this dahlia this is Otto's uh throw and I'll just stake that up when we get back and then over here again just cleaned up just look at how much better that looks there's no obstruction in the path I cleaned up some of our trees some of the dead um uh branches and just kind of scooped everything up and then this side too everything just looks a whole lot better same over here cut back the irises the peonies take out some of the dead vines around the trees it just looks so much better from this angle like that really opened things up and will allow us to have a better visual of what we're going to do in this space in the fall time in terms of bringing in some more plants and same over here I didn't get to um weeding everything that I wanted back here but we did take out some things so we'll just continue doing that all the way through here and just coming in we'll come in another day and just fine-tune everything a little bit better anyways sorry to end this video kind of abruptly but you know she's not feeling good so I definitely want to take her and she has an appointment so we're heading over to urgent care and hopefully everything is going to be okay just saying my prayers and crossing my fingers it's nothing we will continue to tidy up the garden here as well just to make sure everything looks nice for the fall time and we get our garden ready for that transition and all of that good stuff thank you guys so much for hanging out with me today in my garden I hope you enjoyed today's video and I'll see you guys in the next one bye