... and on Friday, She Rests.

Those of you who are familiar with my gardens will be in shock over the changes on the Rambler Fence.  It doesn't look like this anymore, at least for now.

Like some of my other gardens, the Rambler Fence was overlooked for a while (years, in fact) and it became like this:

In my imagination, I could see that it could be beautiful this again, but it was going to take some drastic measures.

Old photo, when 'Leontine Gervais' was nearly perfect.

How's this for drastic?

For the past few months, I have been clearing the fence by cutting the ramblers back to only a few canes.  Duplicate roses, like 'Albertine' and 'Paul Transon', were removed ... replaced by 'Queen of the Prairies' and 'Shower of Gold' from the Pot Ghetto.  Dead Tea roses have been dug out.  (The winter of 2013 was much colder than average, and my tall, mature Tea Roses were cut almost to the ground by freeze damage.  2014's winter froze them again and few of them recovered.)  I replaced some of these right away (more roses out of the Pot Ghetto) and other empty places will be filled with roses from last year's propagation ... which aren't ready to be outside on their own quite yet.

Last fall, I realigned and expanded the east end of this garden.  It used to follow the fence in an eight-foot-wide strip.  Now, the fence makes a corner and the bed continues straight ... which gave me room for ten new roses in that space!  I planted the roses last fall.  They're really small, but they're already putting on some new growth.

The part of the bed to the right of the red line is the new section.

Yesterday (Thursday), I faced a situation where I had no choice.  My truck was full of a new load of two yards of mulch, rain was predicted for Friday, and I need my truck to be empty for a nursery run on Saturday.  It will be no surprise to you that I challenged myself spread all that mulch to empty the truck by the end of the day ... by myself, because there was no help available.

First, I freshened up the old mulch from last fall in the expanded part of the garden by adding a scant one-inch of fresh mulch over the old.

I wanted this LONG garden to have a unified look when I was finished, instead of the patchwork mulch that was there when I started.

Last year's faded mulch, last month's not-quite-so faded mulch, and last week's load of new mulch.

You can see the new roses a little bit better in this photo ... they're so tiny.

Four-and-a-half hours after I started, the truck was empty.  I allowed time for water breaks and lunch, but I was still completely spent by the time I finished.

What I have now is a large expanse of what looks like bare mulch.  I don't like it like this.   I hold onto the promise that it will soon be filled with roses, and that this emptiness will be a thing of the past.

Panoramic photo of the finished bed.  My new iPhone totally rocks!

As I said in the title of this post, today I will rest.  Moving so much mulch by myself probably wasn't a wise thing to do.   It wore me out, and my shoulders are protesting. It is raining today, which forces me to do things other than yard work.  I welcome the break ... as I look out the window and see the results of my effort ... and I am raring to get back out there and do more ... as soon as I can.  It's spring, and this is how I roll.

Monday, Monday

I had the house to myself today.  This is a bit of a treat, since my husband works from home and is here all the time.  What did I do all day?  Come along and I will show you.

I got out early and I unloaded the last few wheelbarrow loads of mulch from my truck.  

All empty ... but not for long.  I'm gonna need a LOT more mulch.

I spread that mulch on the rose border that I have been working on in the front yard.  I had already pulled the weeds, trimmed the roses, and laid landscape fabric in this section.  (a post about doing this, with before and after photos, is HERE).  I'm getting pretty close to being finished with this garden, thank goodness.  I think it's looking awesome, if I do say so myself.

There are a few empty spots in this garden, and I put in two new roses ... from the batch that I propagated last fall from the collection at Monticello's Tufton Farm.  (That post is HERE.)  These new roses are small right now, but they will grow and get bigger pretty quickly.  

"Ruth's Wavy Leaf Noisette"

"Aunt Louisa Rose"

The edges of our driveway and some other areas of the property needed some attention, so I mixed up and applied two gallons of herbicide.  It's best to kill the poison ivy sprouts, thistles, and other nasties while they are small.

I have been replacing the brick edging on the front Hybrid Tea garden, using the same blocks that I showed you earlier.  I finished the day by working on this for a couple of hours.  The bricks had sunk into the ground and were uneven, and the mulch would spill out.  I'm really liking the cohesive look of having the same edging on all of the beds on that side of the yard.  Pull up bricks, scrape and dig a little bit to make a nice trench, set new blocks in place ... over and over.

New blocks and old bricks.

This is a good view of before and after, of a section of the garden that I did last week.

The bricks that I'm taking up are antique bricks that I have collected over the years.  There are these that have edged this garden, and some others in small piles here and there throughout the property.  Where can we store them so they're all together and not piled somewhere in the way?  Store them in plain sight, of course ... laid over the ground cloth on the floor of the greenhouse's lean-to.  (Post about the lean-to is HERE.)  This is a temporary/permanent place for them, convenient and not in a pile.

I had no intention of doing so much today.  When I'm here by myself, I guess I get more accomplished because there's no one around to distract me.  

Just so you know, I'm NOT working outside tomorrow ... I'm tired.

Savoring a Major Victory

Earlier this morning, I put down the last few wheelbarrowloads of mulch in my Miniature Garden.  It is finished!  I have been going out early in the morning for the past few days, doing a little at a time.  The dedication to finish the task paid off, and the mental reward of having this garden finished is HUGE!

The darker area in the mulch is what I did yesterday and today.  It's an area approximately 11' x 40'.

No real time to savor this accomplishment.  Got a check-up appointment at the vet for Winnie after lunch.  When I get home, it will be time to put the finishing touches on the update to the rose program that I am giving at Strange's in Richmond tomorrow morning.  Doesn't matter that I'm running 20 different directions at the same time right now ... this enormous garden is finished, and I am absolutely overjoyed!

(For those of you who may be coming onto this story in what seems like the middle, click HERE to see this garden in process.)

Turning My Attention to the Next Garden

My spring reclamation work in the rose gardens continues with a vengeance.  The current object of my attention is the mixed miniature rose border along the fence behind my greenhouse.  (This garden doesn't have a real name yet.  It seems like too much of an oxymoron to call it the Miniature Garden, when it's 11 feet wide and 150+ feet long.)

Now that I think about it, I may not have ever shown this garden to you.  It's relatively new, laid out and planted last summer.  I designed it to hold a little over a hundred roses that had been living in pots for longer than they should have.  There are Ramblers on the fence, Climbing Miniatures on tripods, classic Floribundas, and Hybrid Teas down the center, and Miniatures in the front.

June 2013.  Landscape fabric laid, potted roses arranged and ready to be planted.

One week later ... timber edging installed, roses planted, irrigation in place, mulch along the fence.

I got off to a great start with this garden, with the landscape fabric and timber edging in place and the roses all planted.  I lost steam, though, after I had it about half mulched.  A garden this large requires a LOT of mulch!  To be honest, I don't remember exactly why I stopped working on it.  

Fast forward to the present ... Just like I did in the English Garden, the first thing to do was deal with the weeds.  Fortunately, the weeds are not as widespread in this garden because most of it is already covered with landscape fabric.  I have a few miniature roses, though, that looked like this:

Let me show you my new favorite tool.  It was an impulse purchase a few weeks ago, catching my eye as I stood in the check-out line in Lowes garden department.  It cost about $10, if I remember correctly.  Worth its weight in gold, I assure you!

To use it, I pull the weeds back with my hand, chopping the soil line with the notched end of the tool, and the weeds come right out.

It only took a few minutes to turn that weedy mess into this:

Next step was to sprinkle some Preen on the bare soil and cover it with newspaper.

Then comes the mulch.  This is Truckload #4 ... brought to me this morning by my dear husband, while I was weeding.

I scooped and toted and spread mulch until mid-afternoon ... laying a thick layer on the bare places on the landscape fabric, and a thin layer to refresh the areas that already had mulch from last year.  Stepping back as I finished for the day, I was very pleased with my progress.

That's about 60 feet of garden finished, 90 feet or so left to go.

I'm gonna need more mulch.

Friday Flowers: Changes in the Arcade Garden

Toward the middle of our property, we built a large structure that I call The Arcade (because it has arches).  This serves as a place for climbing roses along the 'path' to the Rose Field and English Garden beyond. 

Like the majority of my gardens now, The Arcade is suffering from lots of weeds and very little mulch.  Storms we had on Sunday made the soil perfect for pulling weeds and, while I was in a holding pattern for the plumbing consultation for The Shack on Wednesday ... I spent Monday and Tuesday getting this little garden back into shape.

I say "little" because it holds only ten roses ... not 'little' at all in reality.  The structure is 54 feet long and 10 feet high.  The bed that holds the roses is 7' wide.

Which roses, you ask? 

1.  'Pink Perpetue'

2.  'Rhode Island Red'

3.  'Sombreuil'

4.  'Isabella Skinner'

5.  'Henry Kelsey'

6.  'Swan Lake'

7.  'Parade'

8.  'Pink Pillar'

9.  'White Cap'

10.  'Compassion'

As I was pulling weeds, I decided that now is the perfect time to make some changes I have been thinking about.  First, though, I had to get the weeds out.

For the first couple of years, I was very happy with my rose choices on The Arcade.  Fast forward to 2013, and I think I'm in the mood for a little change.  Six of the ten roses here please me greatly.  There is nothing wrong with the other four, I just had the urge to switch things out ... to plant four different roses in this garden instead.  The roses that I am replacing are:

'Sombreuil'

Before.

 

Cut back for transplanting.

 

 

'Isabella Skinner'

 

Before

 

Cut back for transplanting.

 

 

'Henry Kelsey'

 

Before.

 

The tag is wrong.  I thought this rose was 'Heidelberg' when I planted it, and I never bothered to update the tag.

 

 

'Swan Lake'

 

The pink flowers are from the next rose 'Parade', arching over into Swan Lake's space.

 

Ready to transplant.

 

 

It is a fairly simple process to dig up an established rose.  Cut the rose back to a point where it is safe to work with, dig it up with as large a rootball as you can handle.  There's no artful spring pruning here ... just cut it back and dig it up.  I put these roses into large pots for now.  They should recover and start to grow again soon, and I plan to offer them for sale this fall.

I don't have photos of the flowers on the four new replacement roses yet ... they're too small and haven't flowered yet.  For the record, they are Movement, Pirontina, Orfeo, and Looping.  (each name links to that rose's page on Help Me Find, so you can see what they look like from other people's photos.)

With the weeds removed and new roses planted, it was time for mulch.  In the past, I used thick layers of newspaper under my mulch, but the soil here degrades anything organic like that at an unbelievable pace ... and soon I'm right back where I started, with weeds and nothing to help prevent them.  Landscape fabric under my nursery benches did a super job of smothering weeds for the past two years, so now I'm using it under any mulch that I apply.  I cut large holes in the landscape fabric for the roses, then I cover the holes with newspaper before adding mulch.

It's no surprise that my two day job stretched into an extra day.  By the end of Wednesday, I had made great progress.  All that's left to do now is to cut back 'Pink Pillar', 'Parade', and 'White Cap' so I can lay fabric and put mulch underneath them.  Can't do that right now, though, because there's a bird nest in 'White Cap' and I don't want to disturb it.

Accomplishments like this serve to fuel my motivation, and I'm all energized to keep at it and see how much of this place I can whip into shape.  Not resting on my success with The Arcade, on Thursday I attacked the roses and weeds in the Hybrid Tea Garden in the front yard (with the generous assistance of my friend Robert).  Weeds there are gone, Preen is applied to prevent any new sprouts, and the first two rows of landscape fabric are down.  Today, it is raining ... which forces me to stay in the house and take a day off from outside work ... but it loosens more weeds, so I get right back at it tomorrow.  (This is really therapeutic!)

What are you planning to do this weekend?