Perfect Weekend part 2

Wednesday, Mar. 19, 2003 – 7:20 a.m.

2003-03-19 7:20

A Reorg Job

To continue where I left off… Sunday a week ago was also a beautiful day for working in the garden. To be honest, I don’t remember whether I did the lawn on Saturday or Sunday but one of the things I did was apply fertilizer to the lawn. I had purchased one big bag and one small bag of the stuff (enough to cover 20,0000 square feet…) but I guess that was not enough. I got about 3/4 done with the job before I ran out of stuff. Oh well, guess I am going back to Lowes again.

After looking at what I had and where I had it, I decided to move the Artistry from where it was next to the Fragrant Cloud to bed #3, where the not-Chicago Peace had been. I still think that the spot that I had tried to put an Iceberg bush is a good spot for one so I am going to get a REAL Iceberg to put there. In the spot where I had the Artistry, I decided to put the John F Kennedy; it was too close to Peace anyway. I also had the spot where I took out the Angel Face. I chose to plant the Madame Berkley that I had gotten from Ashdown Roses at the winter meeting. I thought it would be better to put it in the ground rather than go with putting it in a pot. That leave me two vacant spots in the beds: where JFK was (in bed 1 next to Peace) and where St. Patrick died (in bed #4), plus the spot I will put the Iceberg when I get it. Oh, I also have one big planter to work with. Beyond that, I am going to have to build or buy planters.

Rose Rescue

While at Nia’s saturday night, I found out that Reilly and Liz had several roses that they wanted to get rid of. Something about not wanting roses… I don’t understand it but their loss is my gain! I called up Reilly and talked with him about it. He said they had two roses so I offered to come over and dig them up. I got there shortly before 3pm on sunday afternoon and Liz showed me where they were. Not the best place for roses… they were under some pine trees and the drainage seemed less than optimal (since they were in the process of putting in a french drain about three ft away). Well they come out of the ground pretty easily and I was on my way in about 10 minutes. I have to idea what kind of roses they are but they appeared to be pretty gangly. We will see what I end up with… for all I know, they are canes from root stock.

Wednesday Yard Tasks

Since I had not finish a number of tasks over the weekend, I chose to take Wednesday afternoon off to attend to these things. I had bought another bag of fertilizer for the lawn and I knew I needed to go ahead and get it out so that the lawn would not end up looking patchy. The weather was perfect and I was able to finish the lawn and apply mulch to the replanted bushes as well. I decided that I would completely repot the rescued bushes in pots so I removed and washed off the roots and put them back in the pots with fresh soil. In the process, I discovered that the bushes do in fact have bud unions which had been buried so the root stock is pretty sizable. I still don’t know what kind they are and the existing canes might be from the root stock but I can tell that they are not own-root roses. We will see!

Other tasks that I took care of were drilling hole in the bottom of the big fake-barrel planter I bought, clearing the dead wild-flower stems from the central diamond bed, pruning the lavender border (hopefully that will work), spraying with the Neem-Oil concentrate. It was getting dark and might have been a little too cool to have applied it but it was worth a try. There was a good article in the most recent issue of American Rose (the ARS monthly magazine) about fungicide classes and how to make do a good spray program. I need to re-read it and see what I can do to implement it.

Next I will talk about my trip to Dallas but that will wait for my next entry…