In our nearly nine years in our house, I’ve killed a lot of grass. I wanted flower beds. So I smothered lawn with cardboard and dirt, and I transformed boring short grass into beds for herbs and butterfly flowers, native plants for bees, and prairie grasses and sages.

Now we’ve got flower beds galore. Each March, I order 12-14 cubic yards of mulch, and I take a week off of work to spread it around the vast garden I’ve created over the years.

But even before I can spread the mulch, I need to cut back all of the dead growth from the previous year. And prune the rose bushes. And the lilac. And the forsythia. And I need to clean up all the leaves that have gathered under the stairs and have gotten stuck among the dead stems in the garden. And I need to figure out what to do with the patch of lawn we let grow up into a miniature prairie. And after I mulch, I like to dig holes and plant pretty stuff. Live stuff, that’s green and blooming!

In other words, by creating all of these flower beds, I’ve created a lot of work for myself. So much work, in fact, that it’s hard for me to even fit it all into one week in March. There may be enough time to do it all, assuming the weather cooperates, but gardening is manual labor, and a week is a short amount of time to ask my body to do all of that sheering and shoveling, hauling and spreading. Wheeling a wheelbarrow up the face of a steep hill that I can barely walk up, much less push a wheelbarrow laden with mulch up, is strenuous.

Last weekend, the sky was blue, the sun was shining, and temperatures were tolerable to be outside in. So I took advantage of it and went out in the garden. I cut back all the perennials out front — the nepeta, the mums, the asters and coreopsis — and then tackled the ornamental grasses, one of which is a dense thicket of reeds about three of me thick. I tied twine around the stems and used 15 feet of wire trimmer cord to slash through them at their base. I had to finish off the last of it with sheers because I ran out of trimmer cord. Birds chirped and bunnies fled, and I was warm enough that I took my flannel shirt off and worked in short sleeves in the sunlight. Then I started digging out the roots. I don’t want the grass there anymore.

By the end of the weekend, I’d wheeled 6 barrows-full of dead stems up the hill to the compost pile out back. I’d stacked the remnants of one huge ornamental grass and three smaller ones, and I’d piled half of the big grass’s roots in a mound by the compost. Now I’ve made the front beds almost ready for mulch, and with my arms in the sun, I may have even made some Vitamin D for myself.

Now I just need to cut back the prairie patch, which has about 10 of the big grasses that took me a good hour to remove one of out front, and then on to the giant back bed on the steep hill. And then, then, I’ll be ready for the mulch and my gardening vacation.