You know how one day you wake up and you just can’t take it anymore? Well, today was just such a day, and the problem was the entrance to the property. Sure, I could blame it on that man and his penchant for “temporarily” placing his most recent treasures {and I use that word very loosely} in the viewshed; I could blame the kids, or life itself… or I could just set about making it better. I sleep better at night when I do the latter.
“How bad could it really be?”, you’re asking. Take a peak.
It seems that many real, working gardens kinda look like crap, but this is ridiculous! Thank goodness for the loan of the awesome flatbed truck for hauling out the trimmings as we work our way around the property in springtime. Without it, just getting the overabundance of prunings out of here would be beyond daunting.
Luckily, I had already pruned the roses and removed the strangling honeysuckle vines. Otherwise, there’s no way this would have come together in one afternoon. Last year we interplanted elderberries with the roses in this entry patch. A little bit of fighting fire with fire–when life gives you rampant roses, interplant with equally rampant edible plants, in this case elderberries. Since we’d gone with the bareroot option on the berries, and had to hand water them, they are just now really going to town.
We’ll get drip going on this spring, and that should take care of any possible struggle. The low wall really helped to tie the area together, it didn’t seem like a real “garden” until it had the wall defining the space.
Next year we hope to try some hugelkultur, but for now we are making sure to get any diseased material cleared, and take care of some long past due pruning. Some of the trees have never been pruned, and that’s not good.
Hopefully, one day we’ll figure out what this really beautiful rose variety is, it has a simple five petalled flower like a blackberry, and gets up to 12 feet long/tall in a season. Once the canes are longer that about six feet, they are more like whips than uprights. They almost seem to be animated and looking for an exposed patch of gardener to hook their barbs into…
Anyone have any ideas about this rose’s identification? I’ll post more pictures in a while, when it’s filled out and blooming more.
Grow Your Bliss 