Rebooting the rose garden (continued)

Friday, Feb. 22, 2013 – 8:20 p.m.

2013-02-22 8:20

So I kind of got sidetracked when L came back from her trip to Zambia this past week so I didn’t finish my posting about “Rebooting the Garden”. Continuing where I left off…..

In the process of working on the “jungle” bed, I came to the realization that many of the landscaping timbers I used to build the beds have rotted and need to be replaced. Many of the top row timbers are gone completely. This is not a revelation… I have known about this for several years but just have never gotten around to doing anything about it…. So, as part of the clean up a week ago, I removed all the pieces of timber that were sitting around. They went to the yard trash bin with the rest of the weeds.

After working on the “jungle” bed, I went to the bed along the fence. This was the very first bed I put in so many years ago and last year it had gotten infested with blackberry (or some similar briar…). I had successfully weeded out the briar in the end of the bed away from the house last year but some grew up in the areas under the Old Blush and Madame Berkeley, There was also an infestation of grape… which may be well-nigh impossible to get rid of. [sigh] Well, I am going to try! I went through pretty much the whole bed and pulled up weeds. In the process I chose to shovel-prune Mr. Lincoln, Reine des Violettes, and Fragrant Cloud. These three bushes has been limping along for the past several years, producing maybe a single blossom a piece last year, if that. Out they go…. I bought a bunch of chicken manure to supplement the soil in this bed… now I just need to apply it.

I also cut off all the dead growth of the Russian Irises in that bed and shovel pruned the Scentimental. It had gone mostly root-stock canes anyway. That leave one mini (Sunsprite?), the Francis Dubreuil in the pot (not looking good) and the Flower Carpet that is still in the pot it came in (but has rooted completely outside that pot)… it’s the best looking of all of them. Only a little bit of the old lavender has survived as well.

So, the plan is to replace the landscape timbers with landscape block (like I used for the bed I built for Muir)…. one bed at a time/ However, this time I am going to have Lowes deliver it by pallet rather than hauling it myself. I also plan to have someone (a professional landscaper) do it (along with completely removing all stuff in the jungle bed and reconditioning it with new soil and manure.) We will see how much that runs me. Maybe I will do one of the other beds myself … we will see.