Rain is possible, about 30% change of four or five drops, on average. The temperature is headed for 97 and will stay there for a number of days, including this weekend, which is Spokon, so attendees will be baked. Fortunately the venue is dependably air conditioned.
We are slowly winning the algae battle. We are taking advantage of the clouds to do a little weeding. And somebody, probably kids, stole four of our lights out front, probably to use as flashlights. If we have to put a spooklight or the Scarecrow sprinkler out there I’ll be greatly annoyed.
Jane, meanwhile, has gotten annoyed with the forsythia and cut it way back—I’ve always wanted one, but this one doesn’t bloom, doesn’t get nearly enough water to do anything, and is getting taller than the car. Now it’s knee-high. I wish it were what it could be, but it’ll be a while before we put a French drain across that drive and put water over there.
Forsythia is supposed to bloom only on last year’s new growth, so maybe it’ll be full of yellow flowers next spring. My sister has pruned her forsythias back real hard a few times, after they finished flowering, and they always put on lots of new growth and flowered very well the next spring.
If you don’t prune it back, then once it’s grown (a bit less than man-high on the bushes in our gardens) it’ll only put on a few small twiggy bits at the end of the branches, and then it won’t flower as much.
My pruning-book says you can take out 1/3 of the larger branches each year to encourage it to produce several big and sturdy new-growth branches (if the bush isn’t too old all over to renew itself; but they’re generally quite strong). I haven’t tried that yet, so perhaps someone else knows if that’s a good idea for the future, once it’s rejuvenated itself from this year’s pruning?
I secretly hope so. Jane threatens that bush’s life, but it’d be way too much trouble to remove. If it blooms real prettily it might win her over.
That sounds like the advice that I followed for lilacs – remove 1/3 of old canes each year. It does work for lilacs, so should work for forsythia as well.
I used to have a small garden in front of my basement apartment in Brooklyn Heights. I had some lovely peonies in front and persons unknown used to steal the flowers each morning right after the buds opened. One morning very early I lurked behind the curtains and saw an old man, nicely dressed, reach through the fence to pick the latest flower for his butoniere. His age did not make me feel more charitable towards the theft. Someone else also stole the whole row of just planted dwarf rhododendron. I got the impression that people used to cruise the streets in their cars looking for plants to steal, which they would then sell. It was very dispiriting.
That happens over here as well. And another scam: if you’ve got a nice winter-berry-bush in your garden, in november/december people who pretend to be gardeners ring the doorbell (especially if you’re older or a woman alone) and tell you that your bush really is in bad shape and urgently needs to be pruned. If you are taken in they will ‘prune’ and take away at least half your pretty bush to make christmas decorations to sell, and leave it looking lopsided and denuded.
Oh, that’s good. Or rotten.
That scam hasn’t made it here yet.
But stealing hanging baskets—in some neighborhoods that does happen.
The worst: around Memorial Day, some lowlife raided one of our old cemetaries, collected all the flowers, then set up on a street corner to sell ‘bargain’ baskets of flowers. The purchasers, mostly in one neighborhood, found out and were no little upset. Returning them was a bit of a problem, as only the original donors could say which flowers went where.
When I was living in Texas, the big thing was people stealing pecans. They’d apparently go around into people’s yards and pick all the pecans off the trees. And I have heard about timber rustlers…. people who go and cut timber on land that doesn’t belong to them but which is not being watched closely by the owner. That’s expensive… imagine how much you can make off a well-grown stand of oak or walnut!
I’ve heard a single walnut tree can fetch about 35,000 dollars, and that was a decade ago. It does make it important that neighbors watch out for each other. I have a feeling our own front-lawn pilferage was either passing teens on a lark or young children coming from activities at the church across the street—since they bypassed many actually valuable items to make off with these. My bet is on passing teens, who may abscond with something utterly stupid for a transient idea, and not think too deeply about it…I taught that age for a decade, and they really mean no particular harm: it’s just that the possibilities in the object temporarily overwhelm their common sense, the level of which you can divide by the number in the group. There were 4. That’s the number of missing lights. 😉