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Category Archives: roses

Garden after Much Needed Rain

07 Sunday Dec 2014

Posted by ninagarden in roses, Southern California Rain

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Southern California Rain

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Latte Rose blooming in November.

 

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Rainwater captured in the fountain.

Last week, we had two days of rain and it was wonderful. The plants all look revived and some of my roses went into their last blooms before dormancy.

My vegetable garden perked up a bit, too.

Best of all, everything was clean and fresh looking.

It could have rained for the rest of the week and wouldn’t have complained!
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Rose Pruning 2014

12 Wednesday Feb 2014

Posted by ninagarden in roses

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Pruning, roses

Every year I document how I prune my roses in hopes that I will get better.

This year I had a generous advisor–Linda H. from the San Diego Rose Society. She generously gave me some time, advice and pruning skills. It seems in most cases I wasn’t pruning enough so she helped me cut off extra branches and we discussed my climbers which I had been cutting too much! I needed to leave the vertical stems on and make sure the main canes ran horizontal to the ground or even tied them back down to the ground — like a fountain.

In return, I joined the Rose society. They offer consulting services and you can find members in your area who will give you advice. It’s a great way to learn about roses and meet fellow Rosarians!

Below are the photos of our handiwork and some pretty Daffodils too!

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Doodle Escaped with Her Life

25 Saturday Jan 2014

Posted by ninagarden in Australian shepherd, garden, roses

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chickens, Pruning, roses

Well, Cleo did injure our chicken. We did not realize it for about a week. My daughter discovered Doodles’ neck feathers falling out and then the black patch like tar on her neck just at the base of her head. The circular scab is about two inches wide.

It hasn’t seemed to stop her in any way or slow her down.  I tried to put medicine on it but the scab (I guess that’s what it is) is so thick.

It was scary to realize that Cleo really did hurt her. We have to be a lot more careful with her and the chickens from now on.

On a happier note, I have a Rosarian from the Rose Society coming on Monday to advise me on pruning my roses. I am excited to finally have an expert (from my area) tell me if I am doing it right or not. I have been clipping away at the roses for about a week now. It is such a big job that I have to break it up into an hour here and an hour there. I have 16 roses and I’m planning to buy three more despite all the work this time of year. They are the most rewarding plants once you get through the pruning.

I will post an update after I learn what mistakes I’ve been making (or hopefully not making!)

 

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Outdoor Rooms in Garden Haven

03 Friday Aug 2012

Posted by ninagarden in garden, gardening, outdoor rooms, roses, Uncategorized, vegetables

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BBQ, outdoors, roses, Summer

This is Julie, matching her pillows.

Our friends Julie and Brian have one of my favorite backyards. The space has a lower patio where they have dinner parties on a long Spanish table is surrounded by a retaining wall planted with lush roses, lavender, alyssum and sometimes tomatoes. The upper level has a sloping grass lawn–perfect for cartwheels, a fire pit area with chairs for lounging and borders of citrus and cannas. The upper level has another patio, a loggia type structure and the kids’ trampoline.  Julie decided to freshen up for summer and to redecorate her lounging area now that Brian put a tin roof on the arbors that make the outdoor room at the top of the hill. They had us over to see their hard work and have some snacks and of course, fabulous cocktails.

Here’s my Better Homes  & Gardens shot of the outdoor living room. I love the turquoise and orange. The curtains block the wind and sun (and I’ll tell you a secret–you can get them at Ikea. They are regular curtains. Pillows at Home Depot–if any are left!)

The patio fountain:

Here’s the jalapeno poppers they made from scratch with chiles from our friend Dulce’s garden:

Yum-yum. Get the recipe here: Sunset Magazine July 2012 edition.

Julie is a designer, and I think the colors in her new garden room are fabulous. Don’t you? Orange and blue, my favorites.  As we ate our jalapenos in her new room, seated on the newly rosewood oiled teak furniture, we planned the next few weeks of gardening. September is coming and that is a busy month in San Diego. I can’t wait for my family to be occupied with football on TV so I can go outside and garden–hee, hee. Really! Okay back to the yard– it looks amazing. Here are more pictures of all the outdoor “living room” type areas they have interspersed in their yard–maybe it will give you ideas next time you want to create a garden room!

For lounging time! (Not much of that when you are busy gardening!)

Beautiful retaining walls from salvaged concrete patio. I love the roses and lavender planted along it. Some years, they mix in tomatoes. Those chairs surround the firepit. I like that they have lots of thick gravel to outline the different areas.

Sorry, Brian! I don’t have your photo! You were too busy cooking!

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Perfect July Day

28 Saturday Jul 2012

Posted by ninagarden in roses, summer, tomatoes, Uncategorized, vegetables

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gardening, outdoors, San Diego, Summer, vegetables

Today is a perfect July day. The sky is pure blue, the air is warm, but the breeze is cool. It’s a day to be thankful that I am in San Diego. There are flowers in my patio garden and vegetables in the back. The tomatoes are ripe and the watermelons are getting round and full. We have more green beans and squash than we can eat and my daughter figured out how to play Ode to Joy on the piano. What could be more perfect! Maybe getting outside to do some gardening or just read a book.

I took a walk around the garden and snapped some pictures:

Green beans on trellis

Three tomato plants growing together–Roma, cherry and a beefsteak.

Pumpkin vines growing over mint.

Watermelons-the vines are all over the place!

Summer bouquet picked from garden–yarrow, roses, sunflowers, feverfew, and verbena bonariensis, which is an incredible bloomer.

I don’t know what this blue flowering plant is, but I love it for a container garden. I bought it at Summer’s Past Farms. I need to go back there and buy some more (and figure out what it is). It looks like a mini vitex.

Dogs happy for the shade and cool grass.

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Gardeners: Take a Photo!

21 Monday May 2012

Posted by ninagarden in garden, gardening, roses, Tucson

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I had a great idea to write a blog about all the women who had influenced my gardening. I was going to put pictures of them in their gardens next to a description of what they liked to plant and how it influenced me. I started asking family members for photos of my Grandma Vi, who loved to garden, and Grandma Betty who had a tidy rose garden in her patio. Also my mother, who loves her poppies. I am planning to call it Ancestor Gardening, and I’ve already written the first one about my mother and her poppies—but guess what? No one had a photo.

Why? I guess the gardeners were too busy gardening!

My mother’s neighbor helped me out and  took a photo of my mother with her African Daisies. (She had taken lots of photos of her flowers over the years, but never one of herself in the place she worked so hard to make beautiful.)

I sat down with my mother on a recent trip and culled through family photos, searching. I thought we’d find one of Grandma Vi in her garden, or at least her garden—a little farm she created in her backyard—she had planted so many citrus trees, berries, pine trees, roses, you name it.  Nothing. Nada. Nope. Not one photo. The closest thing I could find was a photo of me at 18 months, my grandma and her sister holding me in front of a prickly Pyracantha bush not the beautiful lush plants I remember so well.

Then I found one of my mother, my grandma and me in front of one of her favorite roses. President Lincoln. I knew it because she talked so much about it as I was growing up—”Abe Lincoln” she called it; she loved that rose. At least a few of its rich red blooms peeked out from behind us. But the rest of her garden is only in my memory.

“We were too poor for a camera,” my mother explained, as to why she has no photos of her childhood. But by the time grandma had bought her house, paid off her 1950s fin-tailed Cadillac and planted her back ½ acre with about 90 roses – all earned by waitressing and managing the soda fountain at Walgreens—you’d think she would have taken a picture. Probably she was too busy watering all those roses with a hose—irrigations systems were not easy to come by, and in the desert of Tucson, she spent a lot of time watering.

My Grandma Betty was the same when it came to delinquent photography. I can’t find a single picture of her in the beloved rose garden she had tended and later had a gardener care for. She loved cut roses and had many bouquets throughout her home. When she died I inherited several vases and frogs—those funny spiky flower holders. I imagine them full of her roses. And I wonder if there were pictures we threw away that would have shown me the flowers she loved.

I finally found one of her standing in the patio, next to the rose garden—I think there is a vase of her roses on the table, but that’s all. Well, I did find this other one of her next to a painting of her flowers. I’m sure those are her flowers in the vase because I recognize the parrot statue. It was a white marble bird bookend that sat on a table in her livingroom. She must have gathered the props for her still life from around the house. Love the 70s decor and outfit!

  My mother also found some photos from Ohio that are much older. These are ones from her ancestor garden—from her Grandma Hahn, a farm wife in Darke county, Ohio where Annie Oakley was from. She influenced my Grandma Vi and my mother. Grandma Hahn, I learned, loved her garden. She had it fenced to keep the chickens out. There are some lilacs and some irises.

Sigh. Please, people, if you garden, take some pictures of yourself in it. Someday so relative of yours may want to see it. Or if you have some photos of a favorite spot in your garden, pass them to someone in your family who values gardening—even if they don’t garden now but you suspect they will one day.

Now, what photos of me do I have in my garden?

One:  from the day before I gave birth to my second daughter. It was Easter. I am enormous and wearing a giant pink pregnancy top that is out of fashion. I can’t find it and that is making me upset.

Two: a creepy one of me in a bathrobe, hiding behind the flowers at my old house. I look sort of elfin. I think I’m making that weird face because I don’t want my photo taken.

Okay. To do list: Have photo taken of me in front of Austin roses.

Thank you.

Stay tuned: now that I have a few photos, the Ancestor Garden story will be coming shortly.

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Garden Club Lecture from the 60s: “Strange Bedfellows” (& Good Friends)

08 Tuesday May 2012

Posted by ninagarden in companion planting, roses, squash, tomatoes, Uncategorized, vegetables

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borage, companion planting, gardening, garlic, roses, squash, vegetables

Friends for life

My mother sent me notes she’d photocopied from a Garden Club lecture she went to about fifty years ago. The title “Strange Bedfellows,” sounded oddly like a Dickens novel or an episode of Mad Men. Typed, single spaced and on legal paper, it was written by a woman named Jean Hersey, whom she does not know or remember.

I skimmed the first paragraph quickly, knowing my mother would ask me right away if I’d read it.

“Symbiosis is the harmonious living together of two species of organisms for the mutual benefit of both.”

Skimming again, impatient, I read: “Plant garlic in your roses.”

My mother, who was note-taking during the lecture, wrote in the margins: “My grandmother knew this.”

Apparently, the garlic may stop mildew on roses. Enough said, I folded it up and put it somewhere to read it later. I am always fighting mildew and since I don’t like to use pesticides, I thought this might be useful. I would read it one day, when I had time, better eye-sight and a longer attention span. However, I did have time to plant garlic. I ran to the garage and found a package that I’d been meaning to grow. I opened it, thinking how funny it was to plant a whole bulb.

“Do I plant the whole bulb?” I asked my husband who grunted, “No idea.”

It seemed so much like the garlic in my kitchen. I wasn’t sure if it was worth it to plant a bulb, but it was for the roses, I reminded myself. So I did.

Later that day, my best friend called from Huntington Beach. She was parked outside Home Depot. “I can’t find garlic sprouts, and I’m buying them for my roses.”

Get out! The very same thing? Cosmic coincidence? Mind meld? Did my mother send her the same long article?

“It’s a bulb,” I said. “I just planted some. You can’t buy the sprouts. You didn’t get an article from my mother did you?”

Turns out she didn’t. She was fighting the mildew on her roses, too. I told her I tried to ignore the mildew on my roses, because it didn’t seem to hurt them. (My mother’s solution was to take a Q-tip with alcohol out there and wipe them all down. Now that’s a lot of work. I wonder if wine, counts, because there is a possibility I could do that while enjoying a glass.)

Anyway, my girlfriend called me a day later, and she was really getting into “companion planting.” She was planting squash with her corn and basil with her tomatoes. She had called her husband’s cousin who was a Master Gardener and she’d told her to read this web site: http://sally-odum.suite101.com/organic-pest-control-and-pesticide-a4337 and http://www.ghorganics.com/page2.html. (I really like this one!)

And when I started thinking about planting things for mutual benefit. I thought, hmmm, this reminds me of my friend. Yes, funny that I can find a metaphor in just about anything. Funny that she was planting garlic in roses when I was. There is something significant about that coincidence. Let me tell you…we have been friends since before I was born. Yep. That’s right. She is nine months older than I am. Our mothers lived across the street. That means when she was one, I was three months old inside my mother. That’s how we knew each other before birth. Maybe I heard her babbling while I was growing in there, my mother sharing coffee with hers, or maybe trading plant cuttings or recipes—all things they still do today. Then I was born, and we were often put in the same crib.

Forty years later, we’re still friends sharing things and helping each other. If I am oregano, she is tomato. If she is borage, then I am a strawberry. She’s beans, I’m corn. You see, we are like companion plants—her often openness complements my reluctance; her emotions contrast to my stoicism; often she calms the rant; then she rants and I calm. We alternate moods and emotions depending on the problem or the need. We’ve both been irrational and reasonable; sympathetic and outraged, talkative and silent — forty years of companionship through school, college, jobs, marriages, illness, divorce, death, childbirth and child rearing, parents growing in years, moving, house buying, house remodeling and gardening; two growing things have never been as mutually beneficial.

So thank you, friend. I am so lucky to have you as a companion.

Now that my tribute to this friendship is over, and I will get to a summary of Jean Hersey’s points—I finally read the entire article and summarized it for you.

• Lavender and scotch broom: Here’s a picture of scotch broom.

 

• Dandelions. “You may scorn them in the lawn, but please appreciate them for one marvelous characteristic–at sunset they exude an ethylene gas which causes flowers and fruits in the near vicinity to ripen ahead of time.”

• Grapes benefit from nearby plantings of hyssop and wild mustard.

• Strawberries like to grow near spruce trees.

• Bush beans lettuce and spinach are good companions; borage is also good and good with strawberries.

• Never grow cabbage next to strawberries.

• Tomatoes–parsley and asparagus are great; stinging nettle (!) keeps them mold free and sweetens the tomato pulp.

• Never plant tomato with fennel.

• Radishes are good near cucumbers and ward off cucumber beetles. Cucumbers also help corn.

• Most pumpkins or squash and corn and legumes (such as beans) are all good companions.

• Carrots, peas and lettuce are all good for each other are all good together.

• Potatoes and sunflower stunt each other.

• Nasturtiums are good with apple trees and are said to influence the sap and make it taste bad to aphids

• Hang pennyroyal on fig trees to keep flying bugs away.

• Mint repels ants. And since ants carry aphids and that horrible soot and therefore attracting that white scale, I am going to plant a lot of mint this summer. And my favorite one:

• Plant a white geranium among your roses to keep the beetles away: “They [the white geraniums] attract Japanese beetles which eat the geraniums and die. You can also collect Japanese Beatles and pill bugs in traps, burn them and scatter their ashes over nearby vegetation.”

Now that is one kick ass garden club lady! Go Jean!

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Roses: Pruning Results

20 Friday Apr 2012

Posted by ninagarden in roses, Uncategorized

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 I was worried that I pruned too much. See the Mary Rose below after I pruned it this January.  But now it is blooming and full of leaves. See it at right and below. Roses are miraculous plants. They loved being pruned.

The Crocus Rose is huge already. Much larger than last year.  I can’t keep up with cutting it and making bouquets. Here is its before and after picture:

Pruned crocus rose. Did I prune too much? I asked.

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Marvelous, Mystical, Motherly Poppy Plants: Ancestor Gardens

09 Monday Apr 2012

Posted by ninagarden in garden, gardening, roses

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I’ve read all the sexy stuff that people have written about poppies–the opium, the seductive red hues, the Laudium making. Decked out with teasing, luscious fringe and lavish sage green foliage, they are bee-seducing, hypnotic, sleep-inducing (think Wizard of Oz), intoxicating. Yep. They are all that, I guess, but for me, the poppy is forever associated with my dear Mama. Yes, my mama. The number one –the only—person, besides myself, I’ve ever known who grew them. They are part of my ancestor garden, and remind me of her as I hope they will remind my children of me. Below is a picture of my mom in her Arizona garden–here she is photographed with African daisies.

In writing this, I realized I didn’t know where my mother acquired them because she has been growing them as long as I can remember. She racked her brain a minute and told me that she couldn’t really remember but thinks they came from a guest speaker at her Garden Club meeting many years ago. She said she got a little packet of them at the meeting and has planted them ever since.

Every year she collects the seeds and one year, she passed some to me. Now I plant them every year and my kids love to help me collect the seeds once the pods are dry. They call them “little salt shakers” and they go around scattering seeds everywhere. We also keep them in a jar, distributing them to friends who can’t believe they are easy to grow.

I always plant them in the empty strip along the front garden. One year I got a phone call from an elderly neighbor. She left me a message saying her gardener told her I was growing opium and I needed to pull them out before they sprouted all over the neighborhood or she would “call the police.”

I told my mother and this sent her into a furious frenzy of research. How dare, that nice neighbor, say that!  She called the experts at the University of Arizona Extension Service on gardening.  She looked in every gardening book and I helped her research on the Internet, intent on proving her favorite flower was not illicit. Of course, even though I felt better when I found that they were for sale, legally http://anniesannuals.com, I was nervous from the threat that my neighbor, who was normally sweet and wonderful, had left on my voice mail. I pulled all the poppies out in my front yard, street-side—my husband laughing at me during the whole process—but I kept the ones in the front courtyard behind my patio wall. The final conclusion was that they weren’t illegal, but perhaps, we should not plant such showy, potentially controversial flowers in front of our house.

My mother still plants them (although I noticed this year that they were growing only in what she calls her “dog yard” even though the dog never goes there, and I quit letting the kids scatter them outside our wall, but they still grow, remnants of my previous enthusiasm. I now mix in toadflax and California poppies so they don’t stand out as much. It still isn’t clear in my mind if my neighbor was upset that I was growing them, or more upset that the seeds might blow across the street and sprout in her yard—scandalous! I have thoughts of scattering the seeds all over our neighborhood canyon, but the source may be so obvious that I don’t have the nerve.

So the poppies grow and mutate each year. There are ruffled ones, purple ones, red ones, red ones with crosses inside. The bees love them and they are filled with humming and buzzing. The thick green stalks grow in cracks and driest soil. They thrive with little water and little care, lending their magic to our yard, making smiles, brining memories, maybe making little gardeners who enchanted by the poppy magic will one day grow them — behind garden walls, of course!

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Progress

27 Wednesday Jul 2011

Posted by ninagarden in garden, gardening, roses

≈ 2 Comments

I lied. Here is another way I fill those empty holes -- potted plants!Wall in garden with rose Okay, so I noticed this old picture above in my “No Holes” blog. Now look at the area. That makes me feel pretty good!

Back to the scale, here is a better picture of the white armored scale. It lives with ants and eats their honeydew or something. It also makes black soot on the branches.

armored scale

 

 

 

 

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