Jul 30

It’s been a long time (about a year?) since I posted. Too long. I won’t get into the details of why I stopped last year, but I can tell you why I didn’t resume this year: I decided to get serious out in the garden. I’m using my time for garden work rather than blogging. I figure once the growing season ends (around Halloween here), I’ll be back, if not before then.

On the positive front, I’ve made great progress this year on the weeds. I conceded temporary defeat in the hand-weeding arena and started using Round Up. And not only that, I’ve been pretty good about staying on top of things. I hate the necessity of using it and I look forward to a time when hand weeding will be adequate for the job. Toward that end, I’ve added somewhere between 150-160 new plants. Unfortunately, they’re small and it will be another 2 years before many of them really take off. (Remember: sleep, creep, leap!). I’ve fertilized the roses (organic fertilizer) and broken down and sprayed for blackspot a couple times. That really bothers me, but not as much as pitiful naked bushes, which is what I had after several years of not spraying. Most of the roses I added this year have a high disease resistance, so that’s a step in the right direction. There are only a few roses which seem to be hopeless with regard to getting the blackspot under control. Those may have to go on my shovel prune list for a time when I have more roses than space. I’m not spraying any more often than I have to, certainly not as often as the spray programs say to do. If the BS gets under control I might be able to do the Cornell method next year.

Cuttings. I know I posted about my 100% black thumb. I let a friend talk me into giving it one more try this year and for a while it looked like I was going to have a 92% black thumb. I got two rose cuttings to root. One died when I didn’t harden it off correctly; the low humidity environment outside the propagation chamber was quite a shock to it. The other grew nicely for weeks…and then died. When I pulled it out to see if I could spot a reason, I saw it had the creeping black death on the cane below the soil level. Losing those two was harder than having no success at all. And, insult to injury, those cuttings were of one of my absolute favorite roses (Adolf Horstmann) and I was excited at the prospect of adding them to my garden. Adolf is a wonderful cut rose. I had visions of bouquets.

Still, the cutting bug had bitten, so I decided to make a bubble cloner. It’s really cool… but nothing has rooted in it yet. I’m on my second go-round with it. It’s only been a week on this round of cuttings–too early to make any conclusions. I started another round of cuttings in my propagation box. Again, it’s only been a week, so it will still be a while before I will be able to see any roots that might grow. With my track record, I don’t expect much (if any) success. I’d be completely delighted to be wrong! When it comes to cuttings, I’m Charlie Brown running at the football Lucy is holding. This time I’m going to kick it! Yeah, right!

One last thing: due to spam, I’ve made comments harder to make. If that doesn’t affect the rate of spam, I’ll have to disable them completely.