Taking back the flower beds

This spring Adam and I decided to take back our flower beds.  Free our beautiful flowers from evil quack grass.  Here is what our first target looked like last summer:
 

Yes, there are daylilies, Asiatic lilies and even a pretty rock wall.  Somewhere.  I promise.

Now I don’t fault any of the previous owners.  At one point this house was owned by some amazingly green thumbed folks.  Not everyone wants to put in the effort it takes to keep up all of the flower beds and the veggie garden.  (Especially not if you have three young kids and your previous house was destroyed in a tornado not too long ago!)

That being said, these flower beds needed some TLC.  We (Adam) started digging and found five or six huge root bundles like this:  (see the rocks?!)

Just to show you just how aggressive the quack grass is, look at it below, growing through the daylily root!

Here they are all cleaned up:

Now, I didn’t take any pictures of the Asiatic lilies that we dug up, (I don’t know why) but there were at least 6 huge bulbs, 5-10 average sized bulbs and 50+ baby bulbs.  That’s not including the many casualties of this battle.  The shovel sometimes does bad things.

Once everything was out of the ground, Adam moved the rocks back and ran the tiller through several times.  We divided up the daylilies and started planting.  The original bed by the garage ended up with 7 or 8 clumps of daylilies and 6 or 7 patches of Asiatic lilies: 

Well, that didn’t even make a dent in what we had pulled out, so we turned to the front flower bed.  At one time there must have been something planted here, but whatever it was, it didn’t make it.  There were three green bushes (so descriptive, huh?) and two barberry (?) bushes that were looking rather sad.

We pulled out all of the old, decomposed mulch and planted eight clumps of  daylilies and four patches of Asiatic lilies in here:

There were still some daylilies left, so they went into the end of this flower to the side of the porch:
 

Later in the spring we added landscaping fabric and mulch.  (I’ll post some of those pictures later.)

So now after months of growth, here is the flower garden, refreshed, revitalized and mostly free of quack grass: