Garden 09

2-09-09 – This was the year of the ice storm.  All the limbs that came down have been moved to the roadside for pickup, and yesterday and today I went through and pruned roses and hauled off sticks to the roadside.  There is so much more that needs doing.  Today it was a beautiful day, in the upper 60’s or low 70’s.  Hard to believe it was so cold and icy and we were huddled in front of our fireplace not that long ago.

3-07-09 – The early daffodils are blooming and yesterday and today have been in the low 70’s.  Yesterday I dug a little trench around the north rose bed (as edging).  Today I raked up pine needles and put them on that bed for mulch and picked up sticks…there are so many small sticks everywhere still.

The clematis is not showing any sign of life…I’m worried.  I pruned it quite a bit last fall.  Or maybe it got too old.

3-09-09 – I went to Southern States and bought a crabgrass preventer/lawn fertilizer product which I applied today.     I also bought 50 lb of alfalfa cubes which is a dandy fertilizer for roses and very cheap.  It’s about $10 for the bag, and should last two or three years.  It’s not the only fertilizer I use on the roses, but makes a great natural booster for them.  The daffodils are looking gorgeous.  I saw little leaves of the bleeding hearts poking up!   I love my bleeding hearts so much!

3-16-09 – I did a little more rose pruning today, put 2 bags of mulch on the South rose bed.  These were a new kind of mulch that has Preen in it, a weed suppressant.  I really need all the help I can get with weeds.   I started a batch of alfalfa tea.   The dregs of last year’s last batch were still in the trash can, so I drug it around and poured some on roses that tend to get shortchanged when I’m fertilizing.  This year my plan is to feed and water the roses like crazy.  Some of them didn’t do as well as I would have liked last year and so this year instead of putting in new roses my plan is to really do a good job of cultivating the ones I have.   They may get a little more sun this year since we lost some tree branches.

It was beautiful today and Scott and I sat out on the back porch and had a glass of wine after I was done with my work.

8-30-09  August has been, for the most part, unseasonably cool with highs in the 80’s on quite a few days.  Today the high was forecast to be 77; I don’t know what it actually was.

I planted a tardiva hydrangea a couple of days ago and also planted the iris I bought at the iris sale at the Missouri Botanical Garden.   Bridge in Time is a ruffled white, tipped yellow in throat.  Hybridized by Wilkerson in 95.  Polish Princess is soft yellow with a pale lavender center flush and midrib.  Hybridized by Cadd in 00.  The third variety….I’ll have to go look, its stake is out in the garden.  I also dug up the irises that were underplanted in my hybrid tea bed.  They were a bad idea there, and so I’ll try them in some other spots.

I have been spraying the roses pretty regularly and feeding them every two weeks with Miracle Gro.  They are rewarding me with cleaner foliage than normal at this time of year and more blooms!  Just like the experts say to do and it turns out they are right!