Snow in the Summer and Christmas Mittens in the Spring

Imagine my surprise when I found my elf Christmas mittens in my rock garden.

How in the world did they end up here? Maybe those elves do move around while we sleep!

I pondered that thought all morning. Finally I figured it out. I had these mittens in one of my evergreen bouquets on the kitchen counter. When I took the evergreen boughs out I tossed them over the rock wall. The mittens dropped out on the way to the wall.

Now I need to remember what was in this pot that I stuck in the ground last fall to overwinter.

I am pretty sure I blogged about it, so I will go back later and find out. I can't tell you how often this blog has come in handy for me to remember things.

This mat of silver is snow-in-the-summer. I get many people googling how to remove grass from this ground cover (and from phlox). I thought I'd show how I do it.


There is no easy way. You must be brutal. Just stick a shovel in near the grass and pop the whole shovelfull up (I normally wear gloves, but I had to remove them to get the camera).
Get as close to the grass root as you can and shake the soil away so you can get the full root. If you don't go after the whole root, you may as well not bother pulling the grass. It will be back before the week is out.

Once it's out just pull out the shovel and let the soil drop back down. I don't even bother to stomp on it or pat it down.

I never notice any killing of the ground cover from this method. Snow-in-the-summer is one of those plants that is almost impossible to kill. I just keep sticking the shovel in and removing grass until I've had enough of it (you will never get it all unless you have a very tiny patch--save your sanity and just put in a respectable amount of effort and move on). Here's mine after I dug around for about 15 minutes.
I just leave it like that. It will look great after a rainfall and a bit of warm weather.

Look what else the shovel turned up. My first grubs of the year!

It's early in the season so I am too squeamish to squish the little devils between my (gloved)fingers. Instead I dropped them on a rock and initiated my new gardening shoes. Ah, what fun! I squished 5 of them.

It's 3:00 p.m. and I have put in a pretty good day of garden work. I hope I don't feel it tomorrow. Gardening work usually doesn't make me too sore. But I am getting older and I suspect that's one more thing that will be changing as I move toward those golden years.