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Tag Archives: roses

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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February Planting with No Coffee

25 Monday Feb 2013

Posted by ninagarden in chickens, compost, dog, garden, rats, Uncategorized, vegetables

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chickens, garden, gardening, roses, vegetables

Other than the travesty of our coffee maker breaking, the week has been off to a pretty good start.

Warning—this blog was written entirely without coffee.

Even though it was not a perfectly sunny weekend, it was warm enough to garden, and I got a lot done. I planted almost all the plants I bought last fall and I only have one rose left from last spring’s order that I still need to plant. I’m scoping out a new spot–that means I’ll have to get another rose to plant where I thought I would plant this one.  You can never enough roses!

It’s good not to have planting last spring’s plant purchases hanging over my head.

For some reason, I finally worked up the nerve to start using the Rose Pro method of fertilizing, what appears to be a complicated series of odd things you have to hunt down at nurseries and drug stores to pour on your roses each month—urea, potash and Milogranite—just a few of the things in my future.  This week, I put Epson Salts and Super Phosphate on half of them today (the half that didn’t get the Ada Perry’s Magic Formula—I just love that name and won’t stop using it!).

Now I have an experiment going. We will see what works better. I can’t put the Ada Perry’s with Bone Meal on my roses where the dogs will eat it so it goes on the plants outside the wall. The puppy took a lick of the Epson Salts but I stopped her right away and most of my roses are fenced off (for this reason and the because of the chickens) with that low green wire fence.

I put my first chicken poop compost on a few of my plants too. Hoping that doesn’t burn, but it sat for six months and looked like real compost you’d buy in a store (Ha ha) and the dogs don’t want to eat it because it doesn’t smell like chicken poop anymore—just a guess…

I planted rosemary and horsetail reeds in my chicken garden. I need to buy more to fill out the space because they look nice and the chickens aren’t eating them. Rosemary chicken is a new joke around here.

I planted two azaleas because I have acid soil and they are supposed to like that. We planted artichokes, tomatoes, delphiniums, blue berries, onions and Iceland poppies, which I had to fight over with little sister who wanted them all for her fairy garden. She is envious of big sister’s fabulous fairy garden but hers is just as good…

Boy, I’m so random. That’s a problem with liking plants and not having enough coffee.

My husband bought a Raticator. You should hear Henrietta squawk when she sees a rat. It sounds she is being strangled. I heard chickens can stop laying eggs when the rats come so it should make Henrietta happy to have a new rat trap to save her.raticator

Anyway, here’s stuff I don’t want to forget to buy:

More Bill Wallis geraniums—they are looking great.

More Peruvian lily

Rosa Rugosa alba

Ferns for fern grotto—new idea for under elm tree

Coral bells

Remember to consider weeping willows because Tacoma Stands look terrible and may need replacing

One new Zuni Crape Myrtle tree

Cat mint to plant under roses

New lemon (dwarf)

Plant eggplant this year

Okay that’s enough! It will probably take me a year to plant all that.

If I had a decent cup of coffee, I would probably make more sense. The French press is our salvation and our curse–it’s a slow process for a small cup of coffee. Today I heard my husband talking to my father about how to make cowboy coffee or boiled coffee, his lifetime specialty.  We have to do something while we wait for our new coffee maker to come in the mail. Here is his try at cowboy coffee.

coffee

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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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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

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

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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