We arrived about 6:30 on Friday evening. We drove in to Round Top for dinner.
- Bert and Ray went fishing, so Bert was up and out of the house by 6 on Saturday morning. It rained during the night and everything was wet and shiny when I took my first stroll around the place at 7.
- I cut back my Pringle Aster first thing. It's not blooming anymore and it crowds out my Gruss an Achaan and my Butterfly roses.
- I dug up some iris and reset them. My recollection is that the iris underneath my Almond Verbena is Galactic Gold. It will never bloom underneath that dense canopy. I moved about 6 to the front bed where they will get plenty of sun. I also dug up 4 or so Clyde Redmond iris and moved them to the bed around the old dead tree in the Rose Garden. I already have a bunch of Clyde Redmond planted there.
- I spent a couple of hours raking out the Ehrlicheer bed, smoothing out the soil (damn armadillos) and spreading mulch. I transplanted some Ox Eye Daisies that were too close to the edge of the bed. It looks really good. I spread some red corn poppies and Larkspur in an area that I didn't mulch.
- I spent the rest of the morning mulching an iris bed. There are lots of Philippine Lily seedlings mixed in there. Weeding and cleaning it up before I laid down the mulch was painstaking. And putting down the mulch around the iris without covering up the rhizomes with too much mulch - they don't like their backs covered up - and mulching around the seedlings was an effort! I re-set a lot if iris that were growing up against the edges of the bed. Most of them I planted right back in the same bed, and some I took to the Rose Garden and planted there.
- Next I cleaned out the bed with the Harlequin Glorybower. There are lots of iris in there as well. Same thing as above - I re-set some iris so they weren't growing up against the bed edges and mulched. I spread some Foxglove seed under the Glorybower.
- Today was a red-letter day for butterflies. All of the Gulf Fritillaries were out - zillions of them - and the Sulphurs and the zillions and zillions of little brown skippers, but I spotted a Julia and a Zebra Longwing. Very exciting. This is the first Julia I've seen all year. I recall seeing a one-time spotting of a Zebra Longwing some months ago. The butterfly activity in the Star Garden and the Rose Garden is highly entertaining right now.
- Sunday morning, slept until 8:30!
- I did some additional mulching around Fortune's Double rose and around the edges of that corner of the Rose Garden. Fortune's Double is a once-blooming climbing rose with copper colored flowers. It is extremely thorny, so you don't want weeds to accumulate underneath it. I planted it in the farthest corner of the Rose Garden where no one would have to walk near it. I left a small bare spot and seeded it with wildflower seeds. I also seeded the box where my Ballerina rose is planted just adjacent to Fortune's Double.
- This year I bought the following seeds: Red Drummond Phlox, California Poppy, Rocket Larkspur, Foxglove, Red Corn Poppies, Corn Poppies, and Golden Wave Coreopsis.
- Next I made my way to the bed where I planted five or so plugs of Homestead Purple Verbena. I mulched around the edges of the bed, loosened the soil around the verbena and sowed some wildflower seeds.
- I sowed seeds here and there in spots where all my seeds could get water this week from the same sprinkler.
- Next I made my way to the Long Border. I mulched the middle section of the Long Border around the Madam Antoine Mari rose. It's pretty shady there, so in the area I left with no mulch I seeded it with Foxglove. In the top section of the Long Border I scraped away the mulch in rows and seeded with various wildflower seeds. This is a new process for me. In past years I have seeded the entire area, and it becomes so weedy that I can't keep up. This time there are only narrow rows, where my seeds are planted, that are un-mulched. We will see how this goes.
- The last thing I did today was cut back my trailing purple lantana that grows along the edge of my row of La Marne roses. I mulched the areas that I exposed after shearing them. Then I scraped away mulch about a foot wide and about 8 feet long, loosened the soil and seeded the area with my wildflower seeds.
- Oh yes, then I sprayed herbicide on the driveway, in the Orchard, the Rose Garden, and the Star Garden.
- Headed home about 5.
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