October 1, 2012

Ok, since I started this, I figure I'd better try to keep up with it. I told you a little bit of the highlights of the last few years yesterday, so now I'll show you how I'm trying to recreate a rose garden, though on a lot smaller scale than I had in Ohio. I had 700+ roses there. Here I will have slightly over 100 in the garden.

First off, I want to give credit to my mother, who was gracious enough to invite me to live with her after I got divorced. I guess I am now officially a boomerang kid..... lol   It really did make sense, though. Mom was lonely and we both enjoy nearly all the same things. She is delighting in the modern daylilies I have brought over here. She has had daylilies for 35-40 years and since she didn't have internet, she was limited to what she found in mail order catalogs. I have had a tremendous amount of fun educating her on the modern daylilies. And now, it's like Christmas to her when a new bloom opens. I am thrilled to be able to give her this kind of joy because Mom was always the one to do without so the rest of the family could have what we needed. I want Mom to be able to have things she enjoys and she sure does enjoy the daylilies.

She is 82 years young and can still outwork a lot of 20 year olds. She has been a huge help with this whole ordeal. We've sorted daylilies, kept records, moved them all over, and built additional fences. On the roses, she is swinging a mattock to remove the sod and then I've dug the holes. Take a look and see why I am so PROUD OF MY MOM!!!!

Wouldn't you like to think you'd be able to do that when you reached her age?  I'd just like to think I'd be alive at her age but ......  that's another story.

Anyway, here we go......

 



Remember, I mentioned pruning and chopping out rose of sharon and lilac bushes? Well, you can see part of the pile on the right.. Here you see part of the rose garden in the works. We set all the potted roses in place to see what we had to fence off and then put up a temporary electric fence to keep Mom's pets out of the roses. They don't know what to think about all the new fences around here. See the driveway behind Mom? That's my sister's driveway and is the one in the picture below. I snapped the picture below yesterday morning.

Here is a batch of my mixture of pine fines, peat, and sand ready to fill in the holes.

Then we started digging. Mom removed the sod and I came along behind her and finished digging the holes. I added some of my mix and then put a rose in the hole. Since these have already been living in the nice mix, they already have wonderful root systems, even after I butchered them so severely when I dug and potted them about 6 or 8 weeks ago.

Lots of roots to dig out around here!


I put some of the mix in the bottom of the hole and then the rose goes in on top of it. Now I fill the rest of the way with the mix and then add an inch or two of native soil on top

 Now I have filled it nearly to the top of the hole

 

Just added an inch or two of native soil on top and this one is done.

 

To remind me of why I'm doing this, there were several blooms to enjoy as we worked.

This is "Charisma"

 

And here is "Cubana" showing off

 We got another 10 in the ground this morning before I started work so now there are only 40 left to plant and then we can hopefully get back to the daylilies! All of the roses will have to be mulched before winter and then next spring, I will be enclosing the entire rose garden in split rail fence, and putting down ground fabric with a thin layer of rubber mulch. For now, I just wanted to get them planted and then protected for winter.

I won't be able to plant anything tomorrow. I have to make a trip to Ohio for court tomorrow.  I had thought that was over but I guess the judge had other ideas.  But I will be back home tomorrow evening.