Friday, Jun. 22, 2007 – 11:46 p.m.
2007-06-22 11:46
I made it out of the office before the sun went down today! I thought about going and catching a movie at the $1.50 theater but nothing that was playing grabbed me. It then dawned on me that I had a good two hours of daylight left and I should use it.
I had intended to mow the grass last weekend but I because I was on-call, I had to do work on Sunday morning (the database group was applying some patches and I had to restart some of the systems so they would cleanly reconnect to the databases). The net result was it threw off my schedule and the lawn didn’t get done. Therefore it has now been over two weeks since my lawn has been mowed and the yard is looking a little “long in the tooth”. At least a lot of it is a pretty blooming weed. Oh, and the gardenias are blooming, both the mini by the front walk and the two by the gate. I may have to prune back the two by the gate… I have to move them out of the way to get through the gate. Another project for winter (I think… guess I need to pull out one of the general gardening guides and research the best time to prune them.)
So, around two hours of daylight to spend, I decided that I would go dead-head the roses. I had not really done that this year and I knew it needed it. I could have mowed the lawn but I seem to be able to successfully schedule and do that during the day over the weekend, where as I don’t seem to be able to motivate myself to deadhead. Not sure why that is….
Welcome to the Jungle
Grabbing the pruners and gloves, I headed for the garden. Holy Toledo! I practically needed a machete. Starting at the first bed, the one along the fence, I got about half way down the row (to the Madame Berkeley) when I realize that I need two things: 1) one of the trash cans for the clippings and weeds. Hey, I haven’t really done any work in the garden in a couple of weeks and it NEEDS weeding. 2) a jar of soapy water.
GRRRRR!
The soapy water is for the japanese beetles. I should have guessed that they would be out in force. No wonder I don’t have much color in the garden! The beetles were doing a number of a lot of the bushes, even the Fairy. Looking around the garden, it is really only the polyanthas (The Fairy and White Pet) have blooms at present…. No, I am wrong, Blaze is doing well this year, as is Europeana. These are fairly dark red blooms and, for some reason, the beetles don’t eat them has much.