Prune baby prune…giving my roses a good hack in time for Spring
It’s the start of August, and my garden is going to be on show again at this year’s Open Gardens (October 26th & 27th for anyone who might be around and wants to come visit Creighton!). Open Gardens is a countrywide event with people opening up their gardens ALL over South Africa in Spring. This will be the second time our little town is hosting the event, and following on from the success of last year, I’m excited to take part again.
I’ll share some photos soon of what my garden looked like last year, but for now I promised myself I wasn’t going to go crazy and dig up new beds. I kept this promise to myself until last week when I opened up a new ‘little’ bed in front of my kitchen in the hopes of planting something to hide the ugly gas bottles and dustbin that live at the back of the house.
I was in the market for some hydrangeas as they are pretty much the only flowers I haven’t had success in growing (and because they like shade!). I’m trying out some ‘Hydrangea Leuchtfeuer (which are pinky red…and basically the only reason I chose them is because they were the biggest version of the bags of sticks I could find in stock at this time of the year). In other words, they have the highest chance of actually being in flower/with lush full leaves by the time Open Gardens rolls around in October. Please hold thumbs with me!
I was also advised to plant some begonias in between (to help with the ‘bare earth’ look I’ve got going on…but alas…we had our last frost of the winter season right after planting them) which leads me to a very exciting tip shared with me. Using old/broken (or new if that’s all you’ve got on hand!) umbrellas to cover your frost sensitive plants over night. One might need an awful lot of umbrellas, but luckily I just had three begonias that needed rescuing over night and I’m chuffed with how well this plan worked.
This week was also my big rose pruning week. It’s that time of the year when the roses need their annual cut back/big shock to start prepping for their first flush in Spring. I’m just hoping I’ve (sort of) timed it right and that they all are in bloom for the Open Gardens. I followed Mr Ludwig’s advice and have pruned, mulched, fed and watered everything deeply and will do a spray soon too.
Here are some of the last blooms from the bush before the big hack:
And here is a ‘before’ of one of my big beds. This shows you 20 (out of about…ahem…100) of my roses. I’m not even a little bit embarrassed to admit the number of roses I own. They bring me so much joy!
And here is a shot of the slaughter, I mean the ‘AFTER’ of this same bed…
Now all that’s left to do is go around and seal up the chopped ends of the roses with something called SteriSeal. This pretty floral tube of magic is a ‘fungicidal wound paste’ to protect your vulnerable wooden rose ends from diseases and harmful creepy crawlies which may want to make a home in the hollow woody stems. I only started using this for the first time last pruning season, and I’m not convinced it really made a huge difference. However, I’m not taking a chance this year and so on it will go!
I’ll share some more photos soon of what my garden looked like last year. This year everything is far more established and I’ve spent a lot of time prepping my beds with lots of kraal/farm manure in the hopes that everything will once again be on full show by the end of October. I’ve also planted lots more ranunculus (ah these are beautiful flowers!!) and we have 13 more Runner Ducks (all hatched from my very own original ducks) in the mix.
Until next time…Here’s to creating beautiful things 🎀
Roxy
xox
“The best place to find God is in a garden. You can dig for him there. ” – George Bernard Shaw