Attempted Dirt Therapy

Believe it or not, this is the "after" picture of what the little area off the kitchen porch looked like today when I'd spent about an hour working on it. I do not even try to pretend it looks good. There's too much going on in there, none of it really what I want, except for possibly the bananas and they have not only not gotten close to putting out any blossoms or fruit this year, their leaves are already dying back and falling off. I gathered those up and cut more that were yellow and browning. I have no idea why this is happening. We got a lot of rain earlier in the summer but right now we are so dry. You can see how shriveled the pinecone lilies there are. A main problem with that bed is that the outside "border" has spread into a wide, squat jungle of liriope, chenille plant, Virginia creeper, grass sedge (I think), and other assorted unidentified vines and crap. The chenille plant has taken over that entire part of the yard and Mr. Moon just mows it where he can but he can't mow it everywhere. It's not hard to pull up but it's next to impossible to pull out, as its vine-like roots break off and will sprout themselves. I have just looked this plant up and ours is actually dwarf chenille plant which is grown as ground cover, and baby, does it ever cover some ground. I also read that it is not invasive which may be true in other regions. I swear, I never saw this plant until about seven years ago when it seemingly sprang up out of nowhere. 
Anyway. What was I talking about? Oh yes. The kitchen garden area. It looked a lot better when I had chickens. I would often throw kitchen scraps out there and they would eat what they wanted and scratch what they didn't want into the dirt, creating a nice source of organic material, and of course, they pooped as they worked and chicken poop is a very fine fertilizer. You should have seen the earthworms in there! 

Oh, the good old days. 

There are also roses in that bed which, as I weed around them, pierce my skin no matter how much I try to avoid them. If it's not Maurice, it's roses. So it's not really my happy place and I should pull everything in there and start again. 
Easier said than done for sure though. 

I turned a sprinkler on after I'd finished and hopefully, it will look somewhat better by tomorrow. I also watered the peas and the basils in the garden which, besides the marigolds, are the only things growing in there. Oh. Roses. They're growing. 

And then I decided to try and clean up some of the area beside the house between the kitchen porch and the front porch. I have a camellia there which I pruned back a little and some hydrangea which don't do a damn thing except give me a few extremely unimpressive flowers every spring, some iron plants that I may or may not have planted myself, and more of the same shit I'd just pulled up in the bed with the bananas as well as a healthy dose of crocosmia. 

I was hoping that doing this dirt work would help tamp down the anxiety and I guess it did but no, actually, it did not. I can't lie. I think the calmest moment I've had all day was when I turned off the sprinklers in the garden and took a few minutes to just look at the way the water had sparkled and spangled the peas and the herbs and the roses and the marigolds. Those moments allowed me to let it all go in a sort of micro-meditation and that was lovely. I could feel the plants beaming about the water they'd received. I truly felt I could. 

Before I turned the sprinklers on, I finally got an almost halfway decent/kind of blurry photo of a bee on the African basil. 

I see more there every day. 

If all I do in a day is to take care of plants that attract bees, I have not entirely wasted it. At least that's what I am telling myself. 

Love...Ms. Moon