Yesterday, I was surprised to be able to actually do some gardening work on New Year’s Eve. The weather has been unusually warm for the past few weeks. So, anyway, I’ve been wanting to clean up the dead fronds and stuff from a place where we have about 10 bunches of blue oat grass — a medium-tall ornamental grass. In the process of cleaning out all the dead pieces, I realized a strategy that works pretty well — I took a small handheld rake and “combed” it through the grass bunches, and many of the dead pieces came out quite easily. I ended up with three large wheelbarrows full of dead matter for the compost pile. That’s because I hadn’t cleaned up these grasses for probably two years, so there was quite a bit of old dead growth down on the ground around the bunches as well as dead seed heads poking up out of the bunches. Instead of snow, it actually rained on me quite a bit while I was out there.

The bummer about this weather is that the weeds are growing quite well out there right now. But it’s too wet to use Roundup on them.