It was really cold and windy out, and my poorly-engineered wagon was shedding bolts all over hell's half acre, BUT: the Experimental Farm's plant sale was awesome and satisfying in a way I usually associate with eating an entire box of chocolate chip cookies.

The spoils (illustrations courtesy of Google image search):

* a big pot of wild ginger - nice shady ground cover


* a big pot of new england asters - apparently attractive to butterflies


* a brunnera langtrees, pretty and shady


* a bigass thing whose name I can't remember, which puts out baby's-breath-like flowers above a rhubarb-type cluster of leaves

* variegated deadnettle, more shady ground cover


* nice dark red sempervivens (aka hens and chicks

* Solomon's Seal, also for shade


* a very pretty variety of primrose

* a couple of very pretty, teeny-tiny alpine/rock-garden plants whose names I don't know

* dark red geraniums


* Filipendula, which looks kind of like astilbe, only it goes in the sun instead of the shade


* a pot of bloodwort and sweet woodruff


Soooooooooooooooo I am definitely digging out most of the lilies of the valley to make myself some room for additional, more interesting forms of shady ground cover - this decision simplifies my life because I will no longer have to weed around them. I am also tempted to order an extra serving of dirt from the aggregates place and get going on a sunny bed right away (a part-sun bed will be easy; since there's not much grass there anyway I can probably just turn the soil and call it ready to plant)...y'know, I think that is what I will do, it's hard to plan for the existing beds without knowing what I'm going to be putting in front of them eventually.

Other stuff I need to do:
* dig up persistent hydrangea sprouts, possibly moving some elsewhere, since I may have cut the ones next to the maybe-a-spirea back a bit too hard
* finish weeding/digging around the maybe-a-spirea and mulch around the base where I won't be planting anything (using the bag of bark chips the previous owners helpfully left in the middle of one bed)
* dig up/move some of the damn ferns, they are too tall and generating too much shade where they are
* plant some morning glories to climb the birdbath hook
* possibly move the prairie joy rose, since it's not as sunny as I thought where I planted it
* dig the rest of the daylilies (well, OK, maybe just most of the daylilies) and tree suckers out of the west bed
* cut the flowers off the rhubarb...and also eat some of the rhubarb, that thing is getting monstrous and it's not even halfway through May yet
* de-dandelion the lawn - the lawn may be a lost cause, but that doesn't mean I want to fill it full of weeds
* put up the trellis behind the climbing rose
* prune the David Austin rose
* buy a small crowbar and get rid of the stupid pavers