Productive Day

I started working in the garden about 10 am this morning planning to tidy up the vegetable patch and sow carrot and lettuce seeds.

The veggie patch has been taken over with growing plants. This is how it looked in May, just about two months ago:

Here's the same view taken the other day. Some plants have been harvested already: radishes, garlic, shallots and onions. Some plants have been added: squashes, sunflowers, peppers and tomatoes. Everything has grown very well (unless eaten by rabbits, like beans and sweet potato vines). It's one big green mess.
To get some order in there, I started with pulling out the overgrown broccoli and radishes, then came out a wheel barrel load of weeds.

I moved on to flower beds and decided that today will be the day when I cut down the small Japanese maple in our backyard. This small tree would often be in my way and the flower bed around it was hard to keep up because of maple's roots. I guess I still did some damage to them anyway as the maple would never look good during summer.

Well, cutting down the maple started a wave of pruning. My husband pruned another, larger Japanese maple we have. Some overgrown bushes in the front were up next. We cut out two of them and trimmed the third one. Dogwood in the side yard also got trimmed. After all the cutting we have this huge pile of brush on the curb.Then, to fill in the empty spot in the front, I transferred black-eyed susans, ornamental grass, Siberian iris, and lamb's ears from other parts of the garden. We are happy with how it looks now.
And yes, after all that, I went on to do what I initially planned. Carrot and lettuce seeds are in the ground as well as three nastrium seeds that I picked up in Sausalito, CA last summer. They'll germinate and start growing during August and should do really well during the cooler days of September.

It was 3 pm when I finally got inside. Tired and achy, yet it was never an issue until today's planned and unplanned things were finished.