I've started cleaning out all the flower beds. The back yard is nearly finished, the beds have been weeded and the debris has been hauled to the appropriate dump pile. I still have flats of annuals in the greenhouse that are waiting for the temps to stabilize before I put them out. Many of my perennials have become overgrown and it's time to divide them and move them to other beds. Yesterday I decided the bed that borders the Bocce court would make a great home for many of the plants that need to be divided so I started the clean up on that bed. I hoed out all the dead grass and hauled it to the compost pile and I had every intention of doing some transplanting but by the time I finished cleaning the bed my arms felt like they were going to fall off.

We're having temperate swings from morning frost to daytime highs in the 90's and the ground is still so saturated that tilling just turns up big goopy clods of mud. If I wait for the ground to dry out it will be too late to plant so my solution is to add tons of my horse compost to the tillage to try to refine it to a workable soil. I'm moving my Dahlia bed this year from the vegetable garden area out with the fruit trees and berries. In this photo you can see where the front wheels of the tractor sunk in when I was dumping the compost. Today I'll go in with the little garden tractor, spread the compost and do some test tilling.