What's blooming today?
It figures.
I finally manage to get out into the garden this weekend and of course it’s during a heat-wave. Needless to say I didn’t go out into the garden until late afternoon or early evening as I was waiting for it to cool down a bit.
Still, I made some progress!
The wind was blowing quite hard on Friday afternoon – probably bringing in all the hot weather that’s settled in this area. I noticed that my climbing rose- Antique89 was tipping over in the wind and was crashing into my patio table.
The rose is approximately 7 feet tall and has very thick canes. It was leaning over at more than a 45 degree angle. I quickly grabbed some stakes and my garden tie (plastic ribbon) and scissors and ran outside to fix the rose.
While I was wrestling with the rose our boarder apparently came outside looking for me. She didn’t find me. I was under the rose! Hello! Roses don’t normally scream. That was me that was moaning and groaning as the thick thorns dug into the skin on my hands, arms and even my legs.I’d say that Antique 89 and Baron Prevost are probably the thorniest roses that I have in my garden. I’ll be working with all of my roses over the next few days and I’ll let you know if I find any other ones that fit in that category.
Unfortunately, since I haven’t been in my garden all that much over the last two months I have a lot of work to do and a lot of rose wrestling to do. I know, I know … this is the time of year that a gardener should be in the garden regularly, but I’ve been sick and just haven’t been able to get out there.
Much to my dismay and joy as well, the rose are growing as if they are on steroids. Must be all that alfalfa tea I put on them last year. They are huge! Since they are so large they are beginning to flop all over the place too.
Last winter as we prepared the garden for it’s cool slumber my husband thought he was doing me a favor by removing most of the stakes I had in the garden supporting many of my somewhat floppy roses. He did me no favors – especially now, since I’ve let the garden become somewhat overgrown. I’m going to have to climb right into the flowerbed and try to untangle rose branches and discover perennials that are hiding below them.
I’m proud to say that one half of the backyard garden has been tamed! The roses have been straightened, and the plants below them can now be seen. Half the beds have nice red cedar mulch on them. It’s starting to look pretty nice back there. I hope to get the other half of the backyard and the front garden done within the next two days. I still haven’t planted all those annuals though. I thought that I’d better tame the garden first so that I can actually see what areas are a little bare and need annuals. The rest will go into my planters.
I’m going to get my husband to take a picture of my arms tomorrow and if he does I’ll post it. I must have about 50 scratches on each arm – pretty much from the elbows down. They are burning and they look terrible.
An excerpt from my Gardenweb members page from the year 2002. This passage details how we landscaped the backyard.:
” Well, it’s spring 2002 and we’ve been working on landscaping our front and backyard gardens since early April. We widened and added several garden beds to the gardens. We decided to create raised beds- which unfortunately involved moving and replanting many of the 400 or so spring bulbs that I planted last November! LOL Most appear to have survived the move.
In April we purchased 272 easy-wall garden stones. We chose the red/orange colour which really seems to be a pinkish colour. After planning out the layout of the garden beds we dug out trenches where the easy-wall stones were to be placed and filled in the trenches with screening to provide a solid well draining surface for the stones to sit on. Then we began the creation of our two layered walls. We decided to have our raised garden beds run along the edges of our very small backyard (approx 100 feet long by 17 feet wide). The beds along the long sides are three feet deep, and the bed along the back of the garden is 4 feet deep.
We put in a patio that is approx 10 feet X 10 feet and laid it with red/savanah cobblestone patio stones (4 placed together form a large circle pattern). Along the side are of the patio we have a two foot wide flower bed, and at the side of the patio that borders on the rest of the backyard we built a long oval shaped 3 foot wide flower bed. The flower beds that border the patio will contain plants that grow to 3 or 4 feet in height. This will hopefully create a sort of garden room that gives us some privacy from our neighbours yet allows us to enjoy the rest of the garden while sitting at our patio table.
I purchased several perennial plants from Botanus.com (60 plants or so) and spent March to April growing more perennials, annuals and veggie seedlings indoors. It’s been a cool spring so some of my seedling planting has been delayed. However it’s been warming up nicely in the past week (May 27 to 31, 2002) so I hope to get the rest of my seedlings planted this weekend.
My garden will be a little bit unconventional. I’m planting several wild flowers, roses, and heirloom plants, but I’m mixing them with vegetables in several areas. It’s my hope that the veggies and their colours compliment the garden and don’t look too out of place mixed amongst the flowers and herbs. I really didn’t want to have a separate section of the garden just for the veggies as I felt that would break up the overall look I’m trying to achieve. If it doesn’t work perhaps I’ll go more traditional next year. ”
I’ve planted many more plants since the garden was started. Please see my “What’s Growing” page to see a list of the many many plants that I grow. It’s been a fun journey and along the way I’ve discovered that I do indeed have a very green thumb.
