With the coming of warmer weather, I’m sure that you are looking forward to getting back into your roses. I, for one, am chomping at the bit. If you love roses, there’s a very good chance that their fragrance is one of your favorite things about them. I know that is very true for me, so I thought you might be interested in a brief history about the fragrance in roses. David Austin® roses have been crossed with several types …
Pansies: A Spring Garden Favorite
Pansies have been in fashion since Victorians thought them to be the flowers of lovers, and have been a popular ingredient in “love potions”. It has been told that pansies could transfer the thoughts of sweethearts without a single word being spoken. Pansies have been present in the writings of many authors, including D. H. Lawrence, Hawthorne, Wordsworth, and Shakespeare. Pansies remain one of our most popular spring flowers. They are carried home by gardeners to perk up otherwise dull spring …
Pruning Roses
Pruning roses is intimidating to many gardeners, but is actually very good for the plants. The first step is to sharpen your pruners. This will help make your efforts faster and easier. Once sharpened, you should sanitize them by dipping your pruners in a mild bleach solution to kill any fungus or bacteria. Mix about 1/4 cup of bleach per gallon of water. Roses should typically be pruned when the Forsythia blooms or tax time (April 15th) if the Forsythia blooms …
Attract Butterflies and Hummingbirds with Columbine!
With beautiful bell-shaped flowers, Columbine is an excellent garden perennial with many colorful hybrid varieties to choose from. Its distinctive, bell-shaped, spurred flowers, bloom from mid-spring to early summer. Columbine self-seeds prolifically giving you many volunteer seedlings. With a wide choice of hybrid varieties, colors range from light pastels to bright yellow, red, orange and purple selections. The plant’s foliage has an attractive lacy appearance. Intricate little flowers, they are most commonly a combination of red, peach, and yellow but …
Ride the Wave with Wave Petunias
Wave® Petunias are perfect for your summer gardens. The abundant blooms will flower continuously all summer long in full sun. Wave® Petunias create a ground-hugging carpet of color and are perfect for flower beds, hanging baskets, containers and window boxes. Plant the Wave® Petunias 12in. apart in planting beds and watch them spread up to 4 ft! These easy-to-maintain plants are ‘self-cleaning’ meaning there is no need for you to cut back or ‘dead-head’ the spent blooms. They will simply drop old blooms …
Rose disease and pest control
May is a great time to start thinking about disease and pest control. Roses are subject to certain insect and disease problems. There is rust, downy mildew, black spot, and powdery mildew. A good product to use is a copper base fungicide. You also need to be protected from aphids, rose saw flies, and Japanese beetles. For pest control only, Captain Jack’s dead bug juice is a great preventative. It also will not harm beneficial insects. A very good product for …
All about Larry’s Rose Garden
My wife, Sue, and I have about 20 flower beds and 5 of them have roses in them. We have 2 water gardens and a lotus pond. Last year, we built a new greenhouse that has been a great addition to our yard. This allowed us to start our new plants a lot earlier this year. All the things that you see in the pictures were done by us with out any professional help. We expanded the biggest front flower …
Tips for watering Hanging Baskets
With the weather warming up, we’ve been getting a lot of questions about watering, especially about hanging baskets, so I thought I would share a couple of tips … When watering containers, hanging baskets especially, water until the basket feels heavy with water weight and water runs freely from the drainage hole. If water comes out right away, then the basket is more than likely so dry that the soil has pulled away from the sides of pot and has created …
Late Summer Rose Care
Hello Rose Fan! I have seen a few Japanese beetles, which is why I always recommend walking your garden every day. If you see holes in your rose petals then you might have them too. I have found the best remedy to be Captain Jack’s Dead Bug Brew – labeled safe for organics, a biological control for foliage feeding worms. Simply put, it messes up their digestion and they die. Spray it on after dusk, on dry leaves, and avoid spraying open flowers. …
Hardy Hibiscus: Plate-size flowers will make you the envy of the neighborhood!
Hardy perennial hibiscus (also called rose mallow) are showstoppers in my late-summer garden. Huge plate-size flowers in shades of pink, red or white burst forth from stout plants in late July/early August. Although the individual flowers only last a day, the succession of flowers can last for up to eight weeks. These amazing blooms have prompted many strangers to knock on my door to inquire about the bush with flowers the size of dinner plates. These Hibiscus flowers are amazing …