Day 3. I was pretty confident in my abilities to garden as the last two days had gone so well, but I spoke too soon.

The area I wanted to plant the perennials is riddled with weeds or at least what I thought were weeds. So naturally I need to sort out this issue first before I started planting. For the last two summers, I have ruthlessly pulled out these weeds because they looked so bad and so out of place as there was no rhyme or reason to their placement.

But every single year they came back in full force. So I did some Googling and found the app PictureThis and not to be dramatic… IT SAVED MY LIFE.

The app allows you to scan pictures of the plant in question and it will identify it for you and provide you with all the information you need from care instructions to fun little facts.

I got to scanning and learn that the “weed” that kept returning was Lily of the Valley, a somewhat invasive plant that spreads rapidly and is nearly impossible to get rid of. So back to Googling – where I learned that you have to dig out the roots and then douse the area is weed killer.

Now this part is where it all goes off rails. It took me nearly two hours to get out the roots of the plant.

It felt like the roots just kept coming. No matter how deep I dug there was more and they were all over the garden bed. But alas, with some patience and blood, sweat, and tears I got them out. Or at least I think I did, we won’t really know unit next year. And for good measure I sprayed enough weed killer to eradicate a valley of weeds.

After the whole ordeal, I decided that I need to take a break and plant the perennials the next day.

The next day, it was easy work. I watched a quick video before I got started:

And I did the work. Planting them was the easy part. The hard part will be seeing if they actually growing. Fingers crossed.