Hurricane and Classes (part 1)

Friday, Oct. 10, 2003 – 5:51 p.m.

2003-10-10 5:51

Well, I did it again… got behind in my diary entries to the point where it just became a task to catch up. Yes, I know if I would write short entries more frequently, I wouldn’t get so far behind and then it would not be so hard to catch up. [sigh] oh well.

So! It has been about 6 weeks since I last posted… what has happened in that time? Let me get the mundane stuff out of the way first… I have sprayed twice, once with a combination Orthenex and Mancozeb and the second time about 2 weeks later with Immunox Plus. Both treat blackspot, in addition to other things…. not that it has made much of a difference…

The Mighty Wind

One of the big events in the garden occurred several weekends ago… Hurricane Isobel. The entire third week in September was spent watching the weather and trying to guess where the hurricane would come ashore. All the models put it coming on to the NC outer banks and, Gee, they got it right. The prediction was for it to go east of the Triangle and that was also on the money. Still, not knowing where it would go, I did SOME prep for the storm. I moved all the things that could blow around in the back yard, like the plants on the back deck, into the house or the barn. I also made sure I had two tanks of propane for the gas grill, in case I completely lost power. Oh, I also filled up my bathtub so that I had water to flush the toilet… There were some gaps in my prep, however… I forgot to fill up the bunch of spare milk jugs I had save for that (so I had water to flush but not to drink…Screwed up priorities, eh? [grin]) I also forgot to check the rose beds and secure the potted bushes.

Well, Thursday Sept 18 was the day that Isobel landed. I went into work for the morning but left about noon which was when things started to get messy outside. Fortunately, the storm was pretty much a non-event. We got some rain (a couple of inches) and some heavy winds but, like they predicted, the storm went well east of here. Fortunately it was also a fairly fast moving storm so it didn’t hit any one area for that long. Still, it did a fair amount of damage on the coast (cut a new inlet in Hatteras Island and cut Hatteras Village off from direct road access) and it knocked out power to a lot of folk in southern VA. I only lost power for a couple of hours at one point and that was in the middle of the day… It did, however, blink a lot.

The roses came through pretty well… I could say “Blackspot? what Blackspot??” because the wind blew all the infected leaves off the bushes. However, that did leave a number of bushes pretty much denuded of leaves. The only real causality of the storm was the Francis Dubreil… It is in a formed foam pot, which is great from the point of view of it is light if you need to move the bush, but, alas, that means that the storm blew it over and one of the nice lower canes was bent and almost broken off. Several of the other bushes ended up with some pretty tangled canes and I had a time untangling the Rembrandt and Rosa Mundi from the French Lace and Glowing Peace.

[sigh] Time is pressing so I will have to post the rest of this later.