<--------left sidebar link THE CAPTAIN AND LIME. That little camera of hers did good! Plus the infamous keelhauling of Pegleg Sam...
spring flower pix are up on Jane's site…
by CJ | Jun 26, 2010 | Journal | 13 comments
13 Comments
Submit a Comment Cancel reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.
Oh.my.goodness. I LOVE LOVE LOVE your irises. Bearded irises are my absolute favorite flower and that black one is to DIE for! The others are great too, but I that black one made my heart skip a beat. Beautiful!
Jane has the pix on her site, and I have appended my ‘care of iris’ notes, on her discussion.
The Mrs loves your irises and wants to know if you will be giving out any of the bulbs when you divide them.
Possibly. We don’t know what we’ll find until we dig down and do the transplant; also we hadn’t contemplated passing them around, but hey, we can: it’s just that we only wrote (on the leaves) the colors of some of them, and a few were out of our reach, so though we knew what they were, we couldn’t reach them to write, and now they’re out of bloom and anonymous. We may be able to id some, as we go, but mostly it’s potluck and see what happens when it blooms. We have a lot of purple, but its a ruffled purple and nicely showy.
The Mrs loves all of them and even one random bulb would be cherished and well cared for.
They are all beautiful and even one random bulb would be cherished and well cared for.
Envy, envy, envy…I only have one bearded iris and it’s already gone for the year.
The irises are gorgeous! Such pretty color combinations!
Beautiful irises and the peonies! Wonderful! More plants that I need to grow again. 🙂 😀 😆
We have learned that most of the US has alkaline tapwater…and most of our beloved plants are acid-loving. Iris are fairly indifferent. To my observation, peonies are quite happy growing next to limestone (alkaline). But roses, rhodies, azaleas, Japanese Maple, clematis, cypresses of all sorts, most evergreens and most soft-leaved plants are much happier with acid soil. I have really been tempted to put white vinegar in the mixing chamber of a hose-fertilizer bottle and see how various plants like acid rain…but it’s a lot safer just to divert all coffee grounds to the garden. Coffee grounds are tea leaves: if you garden, and have a friend who consumes a lot of either, get them to save same for you.
A fellow gardener who has her garden on top of limestone uses MiracleGro acidifier every time she waters. It seems to work. 🙂
Acid soil is not a problem here as we are in the middle of secondary growth oak and beech forest. Since this is all glacial moraine (two or three inches of top soil over cemented gravel) I do a *lot* of soil amendment. When I planted the rose (thanks again for the good advice.) I did not add any lime, just a good amount of slow release MiracleGro. I’ve been using MiracleGro every time I water which seems to have done the trick. For the first time in my life I have had a rose BLOOM!
Keep dumping coffee or tea grounds on it plus the miraclegrow, and if you are in a region where you can get crushed pecan hull mulch, put that on an inch thick. A rose’s roots come up very near the surface, which is why they suffer in hot weather: mulch heavily with an acidic mulch, pecan hulls being quite good for this, and keep it on those roots. Build a little 2″ by yardwide dam in ring form around the rose, which will help keep the mulch in place during watering and rains, and will also hold water longer in the zone where its roots are. Figure the root ring reaches outward in all directions about as far as the rose bush ‘heart’ is tall.
And get a rain barrel or three. Best water save rain itself for watering with. Screen the top against leaves or mosquitos, or use a “mosquito dunk” (floating hunk of compressed sawdust impregnated with Bt that kills ’em).