Every Hour on the Hour!
May. 29th, 2003 04:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
greenstormIt's the Greenstorm Reality Internet Network! Bringing you all the best pickin's from Greenstorm's brain. It'll settle down this weekend. Here goes:
I've got the garden preliminary-watered. That is, I hadn't done it for four days so things were pretty dry and the mulch (mushroom manure, I'm on the third story balcony in pots. My medium is sunshine mix, sometimes with added peat, mulched with mushroom manure) was resisting water a little bit. Two of my roses, JFK and either Heritage or Brother Cadfael (I didn't label them) were pretty dry and requires a lot of trickling as the soil'd pulled away from the sides of the pots.
So tomorrow I go out and fertilise before I leave for the weekend -- miracle gro, 20-20-20, which even at high dilution I don't want to use on perfectly dry roots.
I've got a lot of blooms out there. Earnest Markham clematis is blooming, fading slowly from a brilliant COLOUR to a less brilliant silvery purple-maroon. One bloom, but beautiful -- I can't wait until next year.
For roses, the other one that's either Heritage or Brother Cadfael is blooming (I think it's Heritage and the other is Cadfael but I'm not 100% until they're both out at once) as is JFK, Love, Abraham Darby... okay, not that many. But Cecile Bruenner, the other of Heritage and Cadfael, and reine des violettes are covered in buds, and reine and tentative-Cadfael are showing colour. My Sterling Silvers are doing terribly. I am very tempted to trash them and start over. Ye gods, -kill- one....? I'll think about it.
I've got violets coming up nearly everywhere. Weeds, they say, on the East coast. They're not hard to pull up where they're not wanted, though, and how could anyone have too many violets? I have one growing in with reine, it's going to be the neatest muscari-crocus-rose-violet cottage garden style pot I have.
The honeysuckle has finally begun wrapping around the bamboo stakes I set up for it. They were a little wide for it to be comfortable. The rosemary, a creeping variety, has shot down a couple feet and is almost touching the deck. Alyssum is blooming like crazy everywhere and it smells wonderful -- white, in case you're wondering, self-seeded from last year.
My mint (orange, chocolate, and apple) is looking a little buggy. I think that's because it's under the overhang -- need to move the gianormous pots out to the railing. My Cecile Bruenner is covered in aphids, all those lovely sprays of new flowers full of them, but I gave it a soap spray and there are tons of ladybugs around (one was completely black, which was neat).
I'm hoping the honeysuckle doesn't get aphidy. It did last year and it's harder to control than the roses.
Kiwi and bamboo growing like madmen, the kiwi blossoms have stopped looking like little tucked-up bubbles and have grown stalks to hang down. the bamboo shot at least two feet while I was gone, I need to keep the water on it to provide stuff to fill all those expanded cells. the culm diameter is certainly bigger on these new shoots, which is really good. I want big bamboo, dammit!
I'm worried about the soil that the serbian spruce is in but it does seem to be doing fine, and the clay should help it conserve moisture. It looks happy enough. The other red clematis, the Ville de Lyon, is growing unbelievably quickly as well.
The baby's breath is lovely, the carnations are working their way towards full flower, the geraniums that overwintered themselves (!!!!!!!) are sending up flowers now. My rosemary cuttings appear to have taken, or at least not to be dead, the lavender ones are looking a little rougher but hanging in there. The original scented geranium (attar of roses) is huge, and my passiflora cuttings are hardened off.
To the Other Woman's garden I will bring:
o basil (not yet hardened off)
o a passiflora cutting for their fence (or maybe their shed, they have trellis space...)
o the jalepeno seedlings which badly need pricking out
o orange mint (they will need to acquire pots cause I'm not putting invasive species in the ground)
o and chocolate mint ditto
Oh! The two miracles of the day:
My clematis cutting that I stupidly tried to overwinter inside and thought I'd killed is tossing up leaves despite being stuck unwatered in the sun in a tiny pot for months!
My liquid amber minirose that was looking terrible when it came out of winter got cut back about a month ago to the ground and it's absolutely vibrant with tons of new leaves now!
I really need to get on defoliating those roses next year if it's mild. It makes worlds of difference in general health, and doing it in the spring when everything's already growing sucks.
Indoors the white bird of paradise is growing yet another leaf, and I need to harden it off for the summer. The jade is looking better with regular watering even though I haven't chopped it yet. The african violets have mostly stopped flowering and need to be juggled until they end up in a good sun exposure -- with the changing slant of the sun nothing's certain and safe.
My ground cherries need to go in big outside pots. :( And, I believe that's enough for now. Time for my second date of the day and/or more gardening. Let's see if I can pry the SO from his computer...
I've got the garden preliminary-watered. That is, I hadn't done it for four days so things were pretty dry and the mulch (mushroom manure, I'm on the third story balcony in pots. My medium is sunshine mix, sometimes with added peat, mulched with mushroom manure) was resisting water a little bit. Two of my roses, JFK and either Heritage or Brother Cadfael (I didn't label them) were pretty dry and requires a lot of trickling as the soil'd pulled away from the sides of the pots.
So tomorrow I go out and fertilise before I leave for the weekend -- miracle gro, 20-20-20, which even at high dilution I don't want to use on perfectly dry roots.
I've got a lot of blooms out there. Earnest Markham clematis is blooming, fading slowly from a brilliant COLOUR to a less brilliant silvery purple-maroon. One bloom, but beautiful -- I can't wait until next year.
For roses, the other one that's either Heritage or Brother Cadfael is blooming (I think it's Heritage and the other is Cadfael but I'm not 100% until they're both out at once) as is JFK, Love, Abraham Darby... okay, not that many. But Cecile Bruenner, the other of Heritage and Cadfael, and reine des violettes are covered in buds, and reine and tentative-Cadfael are showing colour. My Sterling Silvers are doing terribly. I am very tempted to trash them and start over. Ye gods, -kill- one....? I'll think about it.
I've got violets coming up nearly everywhere. Weeds, they say, on the East coast. They're not hard to pull up where they're not wanted, though, and how could anyone have too many violets? I have one growing in with reine, it's going to be the neatest muscari-crocus-rose-violet cottage garden style pot I have.
The honeysuckle has finally begun wrapping around the bamboo stakes I set up for it. They were a little wide for it to be comfortable. The rosemary, a creeping variety, has shot down a couple feet and is almost touching the deck. Alyssum is blooming like crazy everywhere and it smells wonderful -- white, in case you're wondering, self-seeded from last year.
My mint (orange, chocolate, and apple) is looking a little buggy. I think that's because it's under the overhang -- need to move the gianormous pots out to the railing. My Cecile Bruenner is covered in aphids, all those lovely sprays of new flowers full of them, but I gave it a soap spray and there are tons of ladybugs around (one was completely black, which was neat).
I'm hoping the honeysuckle doesn't get aphidy. It did last year and it's harder to control than the roses.
Kiwi and bamboo growing like madmen, the kiwi blossoms have stopped looking like little tucked-up bubbles and have grown stalks to hang down. the bamboo shot at least two feet while I was gone, I need to keep the water on it to provide stuff to fill all those expanded cells. the culm diameter is certainly bigger on these new shoots, which is really good. I want big bamboo, dammit!
I'm worried about the soil that the serbian spruce is in but it does seem to be doing fine, and the clay should help it conserve moisture. It looks happy enough. The other red clematis, the Ville de Lyon, is growing unbelievably quickly as well.
The baby's breath is lovely, the carnations are working their way towards full flower, the geraniums that overwintered themselves (!!!!!!!) are sending up flowers now. My rosemary cuttings appear to have taken, or at least not to be dead, the lavender ones are looking a little rougher but hanging in there. The original scented geranium (attar of roses) is huge, and my passiflora cuttings are hardened off.
To the Other Woman's garden I will bring:
o basil (not yet hardened off)
o a passiflora cutting for their fence (or maybe their shed, they have trellis space...)
o the jalepeno seedlings which badly need pricking out
o orange mint (they will need to acquire pots cause I'm not putting invasive species in the ground)
o and chocolate mint ditto
Oh! The two miracles of the day:
My clematis cutting that I stupidly tried to overwinter inside and thought I'd killed is tossing up leaves despite being stuck unwatered in the sun in a tiny pot for months!
My liquid amber minirose that was looking terrible when it came out of winter got cut back about a month ago to the ground and it's absolutely vibrant with tons of new leaves now!
I really need to get on defoliating those roses next year if it's mild. It makes worlds of difference in general health, and doing it in the spring when everything's already growing sucks.
Indoors the white bird of paradise is growing yet another leaf, and I need to harden it off for the summer. The jade is looking better with regular watering even though I haven't chopped it yet. The african violets have mostly stopped flowering and need to be juggled until they end up in a good sun exposure -- with the changing slant of the sun nothing's certain and safe.
My ground cherries need to go in big outside pots. :( And, I believe that's enough for now. Time for my second date of the day and/or more gardening. Let's see if I can pry the SO from his computer...
