Neil, it seems today is a huge wedding day--a lot of people getting married on Super Pi Day! We did lots of orders for engraved wine barrel staves for table markers with pi day references. I love those green roses. Is that a garden rose, or just a tender florist rose?
Our weather has been perfect all week, and it's so tempting to go ahead and prune the roses. They are starting to leaf out. So often, we get that late freeze that zaps the early growth. The death toll on hybrid teas may be as much as 75%. The local botanical garden may have lost all of their HTs. Good time to upgrade the selections, I think!
Rose orders from Palatine, Edmunds, and Austin should arrive in the next few weeks. By then, I'll have a clear idea of which roses need to be removed. Hopefully by then, my body will be in good enough shape to dig the deep deep holes needed for Palatine roots. The little trees from Forestry won't take nearly as long to plant as the huge roses.
My husband is working locally this year because of my injury, so I just may have some assistance. I hate to ask him for help because right now, he is outside building our new barn by himself! I ran the backhoe yesterday, lifting him in the bucket so he could fasten timbers. Help is hard to find here.
My math-whiz daughter is drawing a plan for the drip lines, and she's offered to come home Easter weekend to help with that project. There are flower beds and trees all over the 10 acres, so it's a huge project. I had hoped to grow only plants that survive without irrigation, but the drought the last 2 years has shown that nothing will survive without some supplemental water, and I'm tired of dragging hundreds of feet of hose all over, every day. It takes a full week to water everything once. Not an efficient use of my time.
