Tuesday, Oct. 01, 2002 – 11:35 a.m.
2002-10-01 11:35
I’m Back!
I realize that I have not posted in a while. Gee! it’s been almost a month! I have been busy working on other stuff.
Roses for the Queen (and Baroness)
One of the projects that I was working on was completed at Coronation several weeks ago. I had gotten several Kitty Hawk roses from Bridges Roses back in the spring. My plan was to give one to the Queen and one to Baroness Lucia at Coronation. The roses grew quite well and were actually the two that I took to Pennsic with me. I repotted them into nice ceramic pots (they had been in black plastic pots) and they even had a few blooms on them when I delivered them. At this point, I am still holding on to Lucia’s while she resolves things in her modern life.
Curse of the Black Spot
Well, the garden itself has suffered a little bit over the last month. It seems like the only times I had time to consider spraying it was either raining or threatening to do so. [Sigh] Deadheading has also not been done as often as it should have so right now, I don’t have as many blossoms as I would like. In this lull in spraying, the black spot has hit some of the plants hard. I was looking at the Rose de Rescht this morning and I think all but the very newest leaves show evidence of blackspot. I may have to give it a little TLC over the next couple of weeks so that it build up some stores before it gets too cold. The Europeana has also gotten hit pretty hard as has the Suffolk and Ms Tippens. However, the Kitty Hawk and Double Delight has nice foliage and the former has a nice cluster of blooms right now. It seems interesting that some of the older roses seem to be hard hit right now. In the first bed, everything from Orange Garnet through Artistry (that’s those two plus Queen Elizabeth, Angel Face and Mr Lincoln) have been hit pretty hard and don’t currently have more that a couple of buds for blooms. Mr Lincoln does currently have nice new foliage up about 6 ft however. Voodoo has also grown pretty tall but has not gotten many blooms this year.
I am not sure why some of the good producers in the past have not done as well this year. Maybe it was my pruning or maybe they need to be fed. At this point, I hesitate to feed them because I am afraid that the new growth will not have a chance to “harden off” before the freezes come. I guess that may depend on how hard and how fast we get freezes this fall. Maybe a dose of liquid fertilizer now… That would give them about 6 weeks to grow and harden off.
At some point, probably the middle of the month, I am going to stop dead heading and let the spent blooms stay on the bushes. This is one of the things you do to signal to the bush that it is time to stop growing blooms and start shutting down for winter.
I did get to spray the bushes yesterday evening and I ended up using a full bottle of Orthonex. I am thinking that I may switch and just use the fungicide only formulation (Funginex I think is what it is called) or maybe the Spectracide fungicide (I forget its name).
Rose Society meeting again
Last week the Raleigh Rose Society started meeting again (they don’t meet during the summer…). It was an interesting meeting. I got there early and Rich was the only one there. About a dozen folk actually showed up for the meeting eventurally. Rich ended up talking me into standing on the next slate of officers as the VP for Programming. This means that I get to develop the programs for the meetings in 2003. Fortunately, most of the folk who have been officers in the past (Rich, Daryl, David, etc) are still going to be officers so I will be able to ask for help. As it is, I only have to come up with 5 or 6 programs because some of the programs are the same every year: Feb is the pruning workshop and rose swap, April is prepping for the rose show, May IS the rose show….(oh my… did I just commit myself to running the rose show???
The program this past week was Sports and grafting. Sports are blooms that have different characteristics than their parent plant (usually something like different color or a double bloom on a rose that is usually single). it is a spontaneous mutation within a cane and generally blooms true within that cane (though they have been known to “sport back” to their original form. Generally the only way to propogate sports is by grafting so we talked about that. Sports are actually not that uncommon and if you do get a sport that blooms true, you have a new rose! Cool! Anyway, I may have to try my hand at doing some grafting. That is one of the workshops that is on my list but it will probably have to be a Saturday workshop rather than on a meeting night because it does take a while to do.