Good morning, and can we please have the sun back? Welcome to Saturday Morning Garden Blogging.
I am getting, like, seriously bummed by our prolonged crappy weather. As predicted, the clouds started rolling in last Saturday, and it went downhill from there.
For a solid week it's been cloudy and cold. We're running 15°-20° cooler than normal — on Thursday we didn't get out of the 30s, with gloopy, wind-driven slush falling for most of the day. A few degrees colder and we would have had a hell of a blizzard going.
All week long, though, the forecasters have been promising that the weekend would be nice, with highs in the 60s both days.
Yeah. Right.
As of this morning, the forecast calls for a high in the upper 40s, with more wind, and increasing clouds.
But tomorrow looks good!
And it does have to warm up eventually.
Right? Right?
Last Saturday, before the spit hit the fan, I did manage to get the clematis pruned — not a huge job, and not as bad as pruning roses, but still a pain — especially the sweet autumn clematis. That stuff grows so vigorously, cleaning it out in the springtime is a challenge, as the dead vines grab at my hair, and the dried leaves crumble and fall into my garden gloves. And then there's my perpetual problem of putting the damned clippers down and not being able to find them.
Sigh.
I've tried using a small tool belt, but the damned thing is uncomfortable, becomes caught on branches and limbs, gets in my way whenever I'm kneeling, and clippers and trowels and the like fall out when I'm stretching or bending over a bed of plants. This year I'm trying a small pocketed apron affair, so we'll see if that works better — I doubt it, though, as I'm afraid I'll still have the problem of the clippers falling out of the pockets, so I'll end up searching through the flower beds for it in any event.
What I did not get done during the few hours of semi-decent weather last weekend was pruning the last rose bush. I really have to get to that this weekend, before the damned things seriously starts into its growing cycle. It only gets harder to deal with the longer I wait.
Because I couldn't do any outside work on Wednesday I went to the nursery instead. I wanted to buy a bale of straw (they were out... damn), and perhaps buy a jupiter's beard to replace the one that was lost over the winter.
Not only was there no straw, the majority of perennials aren't available for sale yet, so that was a bust, too. Although I did buy some low-growing dianthus, a pot of sweet william, and a couple of new types of saxifrage — "purple robe" and "neon rose".
And then they got me at the checkout stand with the display of discounted orchids. I swear, you people are a menace. I still blame the garden bloggers for my new addiction to orchids. It was one of those cases of spending money because, hey, look how much I'll save when the orchids are on the discount rack and only $12 instead of $40! So two more orchids jumped in my shopping cart and followed me home.
Before the forecast turned to crap, my plan for today was to prune the rose bush and do some more yard clean up. But since I won't be able to do that, instead I'll be re-potting the tomatoes and eggplants (they desperately need it), then clearing out the area under the metal halide light in the basement so I have someplace to put the re-potted tomatoes and eggplant.
And then... hopefully... tomorrow... if the weather doesn’t stay crappy... I'll be able to get outside and do all the stuff that has been put on hold by our overly-cool spring.
That's what's happening here. What's going on in your gardens?