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Breath of life rose bud and rain drops

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Wordless Wednesday

Breath of Life rose bud

Rain drops and Rose buds. Two of my favorite things.

My roses have finally stopped blooming what with all the snow and freezing temperatures that we’ve been having here in Toronto. It’s about time … but I’ll miss them over the next few months.

Sometime this week I’ll have to take my camera outside and take some photos of frosty plants. Even though the plants are wilting due to the cold they can still look pretty neat when covered with snow, frost or ice.

Yes I know this Wordless Wednesday post is late, again! I got mixed up as to what day it was – again. I’m so tired lately thanks to our new puppy and my Crohns. sigh …






Still recovering from my trip and starting to winterize the garden

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I’ve had a heck of week or three between being sick before I went to Vegas and getting even sicker while I was there. I’m still not up to par but I’m doing a lot better today than I have in more than a week. I think …

We got home early Monday morning and my husband had been wise enough to have both Monday and Tuesday off work. He tried going out in the garden on Monday afternoon to disassemble the patio furniture and start putting it away but it was cold, gloomy and rained quite a bit that day so he didn’t get very far.

Tuesday was a different story. It was very nice outside and while I was lying on the couch still feeling ill he decided to go outside and finish what he’d started the day before. He also managed to mound some soil around the base of ALL of our many roses in order to give the roots, graft and the first foot or so of above ground growth a bit of winter protection.

Hopefully over the weekend we’ll both get out into the garden.

I’d like to trim some of the roses that have very long branches that I know will die over winter. If I trim them a bit I can more easily protect what’s left with a large pile of leaves and some burlap wrapped around the roses. Then when spring comes all I’ve got to do is take the burlap off and digg out the leaves and if it’s anything like previous years there will be very little winter damage to the rose branches and if I’m really lucky the stems might even still be green.

Most of our roses are fairly hardy, but I have a feeling this is going to be a brutal winter so I want to be sure to protect the plants. We lost a few roses last year because we didn’t do any winter protection. It was a mild winter but we had very little snow so the cold, ice and frost damage might have been even worse than if we had had a good snow cover.

Have you begun to winterize your garden yet? Or do you even think about protecting your plants at all?

It’s freezing!

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I’m writing this post to record our first frost. Well I think it’s the first. it’s -2 c outside right now and I believe that’s the first time it’s dipped below zero. Brrrrr Well at least all the silly roses in my garden will hopefully get the message that it’s time to shut down and stop blooming. Yes – my roses are still blooming. They always seem to bloom into mid November or so.

I guess it’s time for me to get outside – not now, it’s cold – and clean up the garden and start putting it to bed. I always mound some compost or peat around the roses to protect the roots. I buried the root ball several inches below the soil level when I planted the roses but the mounds that I put around the base of the roses in the fall give them further protection in the winter.

We don’t tend to get a lot of snow here. Yes it does snow and sometimes we get quite a lot but it melts away fairly quickly. The air however stays very cold. The temps can fall to more than -20 c and worse with the wind factored in. If my garden doesn’t have a good snow cover or a cover that I’ve created with my mounds of compost and piles of leaves the plants will be more suceptable to freeze damage.

I’m not looking foward to putting the garden to bed this year. It’s a big job what with us having 60 roses plus all the other plants. We’ll manage to get it done though.

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