Roses: pruned
Faina Scarf: slightly over halfway (about 20 rows into the 3rd main chart)
Floors: vacuumed
Tasty Sunday Brunch: consumed
Yarn: fondled
Guest Room: cleaned out of all the junk that accumulates there.
Studio: disaster area
Weather: too nice to be stuck inside today.
Peas: pre-sprouting
Hmm, I guess I accomplished more than I thought I did this weekend.
Ugh I hate pruning roses. The inner perfectionist makes a play for dominance and I spend hours squatting down looking for outward facing buds and agonizing over which branches to cut. I like roses and all but I once read a quotation calling roses the "Poor sickly children of the flower world" and boy howdy do I resonate with that. They get EVERY disease. I think the black spot and rust is endemic now. And the camellia is trying to eat the red one (perhaps because the camellia is also red?).
On the other hand, the blooms are nice and my goodness you can cut those suckers down to nothing and they don't care, they LIKE it. I always feel like I'm decimating the roses when I cut them. Ha. Sickly yet tenacious. It gets easier to prune as I go along, once I get the first few thorn puncture wounds.
I didn't put them in, we purchased the house avec rose bushes, and when I first hit the Net trying to find out to prune them - HA HA HA. Because every pruning manual ever written assumes you have perfect new roses and not hoary old things with stems that are inches thick. INCHES. I have to use a saw to cut things out sometimes. No way can I form a "perfect 5-fingered open hand" or cut them down to 1 foot. So I just kind of try to thin them out, cut them down to not very tall but generally not into the old wood. Whatever. Only one's died on me so far. And that was probably from the black spot, rust, and lack of light. Yeah, for sure. Not me at all.
The old(er) previous owners had a Thing for Pink, as ALL of the flowering things in the backyard are pink (except the lilac, which I think was planted after the era of the pink-lovers). Roses? All pink. (And all hybrid teas. FEH). Rhododendron, azalea, even a Mountain Laurel (Kalmia) - pink. Let us not forget the pink tulip bulbs. Oh yeah, and except for the hydrangea. Which can be made to bloom pink.
I gotta go to Powell's technical tonight because Microsoft is making my life HELL and it'd be nice to know why, and please please please to make it stop.
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5 comments:
I suppose it's too late now but I'd love to see pictures of how you prune your roses. I've stayed away from even planting any because I figure I'd kill them!
I planted roses once. My puppy ate them to the ground, thorns and all, and the dug up the roots and ate those too. I can send her to your place if there are any plants you want to get rid of.
OR, you could just come to my house and work on MY guest room for me... ;-)
Wow. Roses. I can't even grow a spider plant...seriously, it died. I inherited my plant murdering ways from my mother, and I am SO JEALOUS of people who have anything resembling a garden.
When I rented a room in a house in Arcata, I thought it was sad that there were several large rose bushes in the backyard but no one took care of them. Being a college student, I certainly didn't have the time, and the owner didn't seem to care. Then, one night I was really pissed about something and needed to take it out physically. So, I grabbed a pair of scissors and attacked the rose bushes. They were covered in years of rose hips. I felt better, and a month or so later the backyard was full of blooms. :)
Hi!
Here's what works for me for all that rust and crap on the roses:
BAYER rose fertilizer every 6 weeks...no more rust or diseases!
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