ToyTrains1's Garden Journal

The temperature is near 80, it's nice and sunny with a gentle breeze, and the garden is doing very well.  I should have my first rose, Double Delight, in a few days.  The lawn has come in very well, thick, lush, and oh so green.  All of the roses have come back very strongly. The new planting bed at the house foundation in the side yard is doing very nicely, with the three Delaware Valley white azaleas in full bloom.  Today, I sprayed the roses for the first time this season as they've all leafed out, so they got their first dose of Banner Maxx and I will alternate as I have in years past with Funginex and Immunox to try to keep the dreaded black spot fungus at bay.  Hopefully, I will be able to do the next spraying on schedule; that's just a few days after surgery to fix my damaged knee.  I've posted lots of photos to the web site and they should give a good indication of how things have done so far this year.  Here's the first Double Delight bud, now swollen and with the sepals pulled back.  It's already intensely fragrant and I expect it will open shortly.  I came out the other day to find that a windstorm had knocked this tree rose to the ground.  Fortunately, the stem had bent, not snapped, so I was able to stand it up again, this time with much more formidable stakes to hold it in place!

… it pours, or so the old expression goes.  I've come to think that it's not nearly strong enough.  It should be: "When it rains, you get a category 5 hurricane", or at least it seems to me of late.  The tree was cut up and all the debris was removed.  Examining the stump showed that about half the diameter inside had been thoroughly chewed up, leaving hollow galleries in place of solid wood.  A tree surgeon examined it and said that carpenter ants were the culprits.  From outside, there was no clue that it was compromised; from inside, it was an accident waiting to happen, and it did.  Just about the only good news is that it looks like most of the roses survived their encounter with the falling goliath.

I met with the landscaper and he's working up an estimate.  The entire side yard foundation bed will be redone with a new border, new plantings, etc.  The second arborvitae at the back yard side of the bed was also damaged by this horrid winter and will have to go as well.  Once the work is done, things should look much better.  The only thing that will be saved is my peony.  At the front yard, the area between the cherry tree and the mock orange will become part of the planting beds as after seventeen years of trying in vain to get grass to grow there, I give up.  Once the cherry tree leafs out, the grass is in total shade and is doomed.  This will make for a much more pleasing appearance.  The entire lawn will be slit seeded as it looks more ratty after this winter than at any time since I had the house built.

On the old expression not being strong enough, I mentioned the tree surgeon up above.  I had him here to look at the forty foot tall spruce tree in the front yard.  Having seen the internal damage to the fallen spruce trunk, I wanted to take no chances.  The fact that after the winter storms, the tree is now leaning toward the house didn't give me a warm and fuzzy feeling at all since, with a good nor'easter, if it was minded to topple, it would come crashing right into the house.  The fact that the tree shifted during the storms (it used to stand straight as an arrow, pointing toward the heavens) was more than enough to seal its fate with the tree surgeon; once they've shifted, they can't be saved and he's coming next week to take it down.  No more trees — that area will just become part of the front lawn, changing the appearance of the house forever.  I'm going to miss that old tree, but it is a clear and present danger to the house.

Not convinced yet?  Ever since the tree fell and I was running around in the teeth of the blizzard, what with having to clear away so much snow and all, my knees have been aching and I've had a pretty nasty pain in my hip.  It finally got to be too much even for me and I visited the orthopaedist.  The good news is that I don't have arthritis or any evident damage to the bones.  The bad news is that I probably have a torn meniscus in my left knee and either bursitis or tendinitis around my left hip.  I start physical therapy this week to see if that can help.  Well, they call it physical therapy but after my experience with it after getting my shoulder fixed a few years ago, I think they should really call it legalized torture.

To add insult to injury, I'll have to let the landscaper's crew do most of the pruning this year, including my roses, since I'm pretty much unable to do it now.  That's really frustrating as it's something that I have always enjoyed doing.  This winter has been really tough on the house, on the garden, and on me.  See what I mean about the old expression not being strong enough!

After PSE&G cut up the tree enough to free the lines at 3 AM (chainsaws at 3AM, what a wonderful sound!), at 10 AM their crews arrived in bucket trucks to reconnect the line to the house up near the roof.  To my surprise, they didn't power it down first!  To clear the street, they taped the phone and cable wires to the power line.  They pointed out to me that the heavy cable running down to the meter was damaged and that I needed an electrician to do that repair.  So, I got an electrician.  Hours and hours later and a few thousand dollars poorer, there's now a nice conduit running from the meter to the weatherhead (which is what they call the connection between the house wiring and the line from the street).  The beautiful arborvitae, about ten feet tall, that used to shield the electric meter from view is now gone, as they needed access behind it.  During all of this, the tech from Verizon arrived and refused to touch the phone cable as it was taped to the power cable!  Needless to say, the inevitable happened — sometime overnight, the tape gave up the ghost, the phone line fell into the street, and a car or truck hit it, ripping it off the house and ripping off the junction box as well, leaving me with no phone or Internet service.  They came the next day, strung a new line, and put in a new junction box, but the waste of time, energy, money, and effort because the tech wouldn't stake the line back to the house just boggles the mind!  So I'm pretty much back to where I was, missing one 30' spruce and one 10' arborvitae.  My landscaper is supposed to come this week to cut up and remove the tree.  Once that's done and the snow and ice melt (if they ever do), I can see just how badly damaged the roses are.  This spring, there's going to be a LOT of pruning and trimming and redoing in the side yard garden!  Photos of this disaster are posted on the Side Yard Garden page of the web site.

We've had some really lousy weather this last week, with a snowstorm dumping about 8" of snow this past weekend and, over the last 24 hours or so, a blizzard that dumped 16-18" of very heavy, wet snow that clung to everything: shrubs, roses, trees, you name it.  I was sitting down to dinner yesterday when there was an enormous crash and the entire house shook.  I ran outside to find that the old spruce in the side yard (which you can see in photos of the side yard garden on my web site) couldn't take the combination of being encrusted with all of that heavy wet snow and the howling wind.  The trunk had splintered near the ground and it had come crashing down, fortunately missing the house but obliterating the side yard garden and bringing down the power and phone lines with it.  By some miracle, I still have power and phone though the cables now drape over the street.  The street is barricaded and the power company was just here (some 9 hours later) to cut up parts of the tree to free the lines.  They will now have to come and restring them from the house to the pole. What a mess!  What's even scarier is that earlier in the day, after cleaning the driveway and sidewalk during a lull in the storm, I had been in the garden shaking snow from the roses and was in exactly the spot where the tree came down!

It's not fun to admit but it's true.  I've been very lazy about keeping up the blog.  Over the last months, since that wonderful first-day-of-spring snowstorm, the garden has come alive.  The bulbs, what are left of them from the great planting of 1999, have bloomed, as have the forsythia, the cherry trees, the maple tree, etc.  The lawn is a brilliant green that won't be duplicated for the rest of the year.  It's just a really nice time of year in the garden.  Over the next few days, hopefully, I'll get off my duff and post all of the photos I've been taking on the main web site (I've been lazy, but not so lazy that I didn't take photos).  One photo is the reason I've finally started to blog again.  Today, 11 May 2009, I have my first rose!   Though Louise Odier produced the first rosebud of the year, as expected, much to my surprise, t'was Gertrude Jekyll that gave me my first incredibly sweet rose of the year.  Here she is!