25 years of gardening from the beginnings to the decline
roxanna
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roxanna
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Garden market in decline? Hmmmm .....
Comments (1)hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm, judging from all the plants I WONT be buying this year due to the ever increasing numbers of "trash" in my yard being covered in green. Could be Carey...See MoreSudden Decline of a Few Garden Plants.
Comments (4)I'm missing/mourning a couple too. A new Blue Chip Budleia (mini butterfly bush) that I put in last fall didn't make it thru the winter - I'm sad. And a guara that has been an overperformer for half a decade is, apparently, taking this year off. Last spring I even bought it a buddy guara and they seemed to get along quite well, but the newbie didn't reappear and the original came back up, but is very small. Maybe I slighted it by adding another and it's sulking? My Stella d'Oro lillies needed to be divided this spring and I dropped the ball (shovel?) so they are yellowing, but I don't blame them. They will get a lift/divide this winter/spring. As for your other ailing plants, I don't know what to say/think. Seems the last few years have been one climate extreme after another and each plant deals w/the stresses in their own way. Guess we all just have to garden on and see what happens....See MoreRejuvenating gardens in decline?
Comments (13)Good to see you back, Jerome, and it's pleasant to hear you have time once more for your roses. I had about a year and a half in which I considerably neglected my garden, but since mid-August I've finally been able to work on it steadily, though the amount of maintenance required is staggering. Lately I've been cleaning up an area I hadn't touched for two years. I've been shearing weeds and pulling Bermuda grass, cutting out old growth from the roses and mulching. There are a couple of roses that have rootstock suckers to remove and some obnoxious perennial weeds and one elm to dig out, but they'll have to wait: we haven't had a good soaking rain for two months, and right now you'd need a pick to dig. We had a prolonged drought in 2017 (worst in eighty years, I read) with high temperatures, and I found out the garden can take it. All the roses that were doing well at the start of the drought came through it fine. I think much of California still had less rain and more heat than we did, so what was true here may not apply to where you are; also, our roses have good deep clay to get their roots into, which is important. It may also be important that we don't water after the first year, a practice that forces the roses to root deeply. It's hard to establish favorable conditions for the warm climate roses--the soil tends to be too heavy for them and is difficult to amend sufficiently--but the Teas, Chinas, and Noisettes that were thriving at the start of the drought were still doing fine at the end of it. The main problem with not irrigating isn't the survival of the roses, but the flowering. At the moment ,with the summer drought still holding on, there's hardly a rose bloom in the garden. For pruning I'm taking out old, damaged, and dead growth now, promising more drastic attention to some plants during the winter. The Noisettes and Tea-Noisettes always get a thorough cleanup and retraining in March, and roses with Multiflora in their ancestry need significant pruning. The once-blooming old roses of European origin can be prettied up by pruning, but they don't seem really to need it to live and flower....See MoreFebruary 2019, Week 1, Let The Gardening Begin.....
Comments (62)Nancy, I am already beat! Another roughly day and a half of all this activity and I might be dead, but we are having fun. It is good training for the upcoming planting season. Kim, I hope the meeting with the landlady isn't about her having different plans for your house. Enjoy your time with the little man. Jennifer, His name is Frankie and we've been trying for about three years to tame his feral side well enough that we can pick him up, touch him, pet him or exert any sort of control over him. Some feral cats never can acclimate to more domestic behavior, but we are winning him over with canned food. He still looks pretty wild and is incredibly lean and muscular as are many feral to semi-feral cats, but we were able to get him into a crate and take him to be neutered (and to get his shots). He was mad at us yesterday but also at the same time relieved to be back here and no longer at the vet's office, but not so mad he wouldn't let us feed him and pet him. A lot of people say feral cats cannot be tamed, but they can. Sometimes it takes a few years to do it though, and often it is a very slow process where you're forever taking one step forward and two steps back. He and Lucky seem to know each other from their feral journeys. Lucky is fully domesticated now, and I think there is hope for Frankie to someday be as calm and gentle as she is now. Kim, I'm sorry you're ill and hope you recover quickly. Your seeds and planner are a sign, I think, that you'll be gardening somewhere. Bon, The good thing about the cold weather here is that it usually passes through fairly quickly, as least compared to many other states. I hope y'all are toasty warm again soon....without the need for the wood-burning stove to provide that warmth. I think it stays cold here for two more days and the warming trend starts around Monday. If that has changed, I don't want to know it because I'm just hanging on and waiting for the warm weather to come back. Jennifer, Great job, Finbar! He's doing his job as far as he is concerned, and I think dbarron's ID as a shrew is the right one. You have something I've never seen here. I'm not saying we might not have shrews around, just that of all the god-forsaken-wild-things that ours cats and dogs have killed and brought home, there's never been a shrew among them. Nancy, This does feel like a more normal winter although we still haven't been nearly as consistently cold as we were our first few years here. Everything seemed to change around 2005 and since then winters just have gotten warmer and warmer, except for 2010-2011 which was the last really persistently cold winter that I can remember. Rebecca, They really expected more snow and ice flurries in north and central Texas than they received in general, but it isn't because the clouds weren't trying. A lot of snow and ice were falling from the upper levels of the atmosphere but in the very low dewpoints closer to the surface level, the precipitation was evaporating before it could reach the ground. Our dewpoint here was only 12 so I'm not surprised that adjacent areas of north Texas were the same. It was odd to see the Winter Weather Advisory covering the area south of the D-FW metroplex yesterday, but I bet everyone in the DFW area is glad the precip missed them. Nancy, I doubt DFW gets much warmer than we will today, but I think they usually warm up a day earlier than us, so if we are expecting the warmup on Monday, they may get it beginning Sunday. So much flu is running rampant down there now that we are carefully avoiding going south this weekend. Of course, flu is running rampant to our immediate north, so we aren't going far from home at all since Love County seems to have, so far, avoided the widespread flu and strep that now have closed down 8 school districts in the Texoma region. I cannot believe how cold it has been the last couple of days. We are up to 38 degrees and it isn't even noon yet, but I don't think we're expected to get much warmer than what we are right now. The 4 year old is lobbying to go to the playground in Gainesville, but I think it is still too cold for that. Maybe tomorrow will be a touch warmer. Or maybe the sun will come out. Dawn...See Moreroxanna
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