I do most of the yard work myself but am very thankful that I have 2 teenagers that help every now and then. Hubby once cut down a patch of amaryllis and has never been allowed to help with the yard work again. But then again..he never knew tomatoes bloomed when we first met years ago. My son likes to pick strawberries and blueberries and helps pick beans and cucumbers and helps collect some seeds. He does a good job at pruning as long as I'm near. Both help out in the kitchen with the canning and freezing until the kitchen gets too hot. My daughter loves to pick flowers and make arrangements to take to people. She will do a walkabout in the yard and pick certain flowers blooming and wait until all the ones are in bloom to pick a bunch. We visit nursing homes and the people love the flowers. She also likes to help collect certain seeds. Don't ask her to help with the tiny difficult ones. She eats more strawberries and blueberries than the ones that make it inside the house. She likes the pond plants and helps with them. She helps out planting seeds but don't like transplanting. I guess that's pretty good for teenagers these days. Not something they have to do but have grown up in a jungle of a plant world and they do like it. Otherwise...I do most of the work but the whole family is very proud of the yard.

I use corrugated cardboard from shipping boxes or several layers of newspaper, topped with 3" of shredded or chipped wood mulch which is readily available to me. I don't use landscaping fabric because of bad experiences with it soon after starting gardening, and because it is a barrier that prevents organic matter enriching the soil. If you do a search on the perennials forum for landscape fabric you will get a ton of negatives; IME roots grow through it and make weeding in the future extremely difficult. Weed seeds will blow in regardless of what you use, and with an all organic mulch weeding is very easy, and as the mulch breaks down, the clematis are fed. I renew mulch every 2-3 years. In a new bed I will sometimes put down corn gluten to stop newly exposed weed seeds from sprouting, but I don't particularly like using chemicals in my gardens that may have a long half-life or end up in the water table or river nearby. I have one bed with many clematis along with shrubs and perennials that is about 15' by 75', and I spend perhaps an hour per month at most weeding it to maintain it weed-free. It was created with a large amount of horse manure incorporated, so it has plenty of weed seeds, but they don't sprout with the cardboard and mulch.

It is work, but it saves work in the long run, doesn't it? Everything looks really good, & always good to get free mulch. I guess it really wasn't free though, was it. Talking about hot mulch, a few years ago they put down mulch at work, like they do every spring. I went out a day or 2 later, really hot weather. The mulch was in flames. I ran in & got some water. Got it put out & called the maintenance people. Went back out just a few minutes later & there were flames again in a spot a couple of feet away. I don't know if someone tossed out a cigarette, or it just got that hot, since it was in 2 different spots.

I use a mostly organic granular fertilzer in the spring and again in early fall. It's called BulbTone, made by the Espoma company in NJ. Being mostly organic it doesn't kill the benneficial organisms in the soil like some other fertilzers can do. I use it for all my perennials. Newly planted plants will get some root stimulant in the first one or two waterings as well. Kim