This is one of my camellias. The blooms look pretty good considering we just came out of a three-day freeze. The blooms and buds on my other camellias all died. I don't know the name of this variety unfortunately. I bought it long before I began to record the names of my plant varieties. I moved it from my Houston house when I lived on Adkins Forest. It was a sad little branch when I moved it. Now it is healthy, large, and green. It seems to love it in the Shade Garden where I planted it.
February 2nd was Bert and my 18 year anniversary. We helped Mom and Dad with some of their move into their new place on Friday. Arrived at the farm on Friday evening.
- Saturday morning I met up with a group of folks at Amy Thomeson's house to go on some site visits to small restoration projects like mine (in fact, our house was one of the visits). We started at Amy's property where she gave us a talk about various topics related to doing a restoration ( herbicides, invasives, tools, the history and use of her property, etc.). We walked her property and she identified grasses - both natives and non-natives, and also invasives. Next we drove to my place just down the road and walked my small prairie restoration project. I am just beginning, so I didn't have much to show, it was more a discussion of my vision for the area. The last house on the tour belonged to Polly and Joe. They have 40 acres, and their place is very impressive, all converted to grasslands. They are having a lot of trouble with KR Bluestem which is, apparently, a scourge. You can't burn it because it thrives after controlled burns. Quail can't move through it, and it crowds out everything. We talked a lot about the methods for eradicating it. It was very cold and rainy, so I was glad to get home in front of the fire!
- When I got home I loaded the cadet with mulch and spread a load in the large bed behind the house.
- I loaded the cadet with mulch again and decided to mulch the asparagus beds. I cut back all the dead vegetation, I spread fertilizer (asparagus needs fertilizer all the time, winter and summer), and then I mulched the beds.
- I raked all the leaves out of the Vegetable Garden and did some weeding and general clean-up.
- I used the rest of the second load of mulch in the big bed, one more load ought to do it.
- I pulled out the ladder to tie back my Climbing Pinkie on its support. Two large canes have been chewed off right at the base. Mice? Voles? Not sure, but it took about 20 minutes to cut the dead canes away from the support (which is a conveyor belt that we set upright in some concrete) because they were wound all through it.
- Pulled weeds in the Orchard and the Star Garden.
- Sunday morning I started right out sowing the seed that Amy gave me on Saturday. She gave me two plastic grocery sacks, one was full of little blue stem and various grasses from a relic grassland and the other was full of Indian blanket flower. I used the last of my native grass bales and surrounded my seed areas with the hay. My purpose was to mulch around my seeds, try to keep the crab grass from encroaching and basically to help me identify the areas that I want to keep weed-free. All of that took about three hours. Then I remembered that I had several sacks full of seed that Amy and I collected last fall. I had a sack of silver bluestem, and sack of mixed wildflowers - Illinois bundleflower, an annual sunflower, horsemint, and a native rye grass. I scraped the soil and ground it into the soil.
- I loaded the cadet with mulch twice and finished mulching the big bed in the back. Yay! That took a lot of effort.
- Bert helped me tie up canes of my Peggy Martin rose onto the chain we have it trained on.
- I raked the entire Rose Garden and dumped wheelbarrows of leaves in the edges of the Star Garden and the area adjacent to the Long Border. I don't garden those areas, I keep them well mulched with leaves to keep the weeds from growing. It works very well.
- Watered in the Rose Garden.
- We stayed Sunday night and watched the Superbowl.
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