After I won the "War of the Roses," I turned my attention to the market packs of vinca and celosia waiting to be planted. It took me about three hours to plant all of the flowers (hey, that rhymed!), which, when you divide 3 hours by 72 plants, means it took me about 2 1/2 minutes to plant each flower. It probably would have taken less time, if it weren't for the crumbly soil of the vinca plants - unlike the celosia, the vinca refused to come out of the market packs in one nice compact clump of soil with the roots all wound around the outside. So I had to take extra time with each of them, making sure I got enough of the roots and also enough soil from the plastic tray to give them the best chance of survival in our nasty clay soil.
72 plants sounds like a lot, and it certainly felt like a lot when I was planting them, but when you have a lot of ground to cover, 72 plants don't really make much of an impact. Below are pictures of my flowerbeds after I finished planting everything. I realize they don't look nearly as impressive as the example pictures I posted before. However, the plants will grow and fill in some of the spaces, plus in the larger flower bed, I wanted to make sure I left enough space around the mum plants that came back from last year and are starting to grow and spread. And besides all that, I really didn't want to spend any more money on flowers. I don't like gardening enough to enjoy spending lots of time and/or money on it. I basically do the bare minimum to make things look presentable according to the standards of suburbia. :-)
So now that I've finished that annual chore (pun intended), I'm hoping the plants will take root and grow well and add some color and, dare I say beauty, to the front yard throughout the summer months.
On Sunday, before I started planting my 72 packs of annuals, I had one other task to accomplish: to tame a wild rose bush.
I mentioned in my other post that the flowerbed on the one side of the house hardly has anything in it but weeds. However, that's not completely true. There are two rose bushes close by the air conditioning unit, given to us as a gift a few years ago by my mother. While the one seems to be keeping to a relatively bush-like shape, the other seems to be more of the climbing variety, and it has definitely started getting out of control in the past year. But because I'm such a lazy gardener, I didn't do anything about it until this year.
On Saturday, when I bought my flowers at Lowe's, I also picked up a ladder trellis for the rose bush. The ends of the trellis are only about 2 1/2 inches long, so I wasn't sure how it was supposed to be secured into the ground (since I wasn't planning to attach it to the siding). I found one of the store managers and asked him for advice, and he came up with the idea of getting a couple of iron rebar rods, sinking them into the ground, and then attaching the trellis to them with hose clamps. I was going to go with this plan until another employee happened by and suggested something smaller that would be likely to work even better. So instead I got some stainless steel rods (much like wooden dowel rods) and planned to fasten the trellis to them with cable ties (aka zip ties). And, to secure the rose bush to the trellis, I found a roll of velcro-backed plant ties, which could be cut to size and secured tightly using the velcro.
So on Sunday morning, dressed in my long-sleeved shirt, capri pants, and gloves, I confronted the untamed rose bush. First came the easy part -getting the trellis in place. The stainless steel rods worked well - I was able to push them into the ground about 8 inches, and then I attached the trellis to them with the zip ties.
Then came the hard part - wrangling the thorny branches of the rose bush up against the trellis and securing them with the velcro plant ties. It wasn't quite a war, as the post title implies, but it was at least a skirmish. Those thorns were trying their best to get through my gloves and my shirt sleeves! However, in this battle of woman versus nature, woman prevailed, and eventually I got the rose bush sufficiently secured to the trellis, as you can see below. And I'm happy to say that everything is still in place as of Monday - even after a very breezy Sunday afternoon.
Here's a picture of how the trellis is fastened to the steel rods.
So it's just about "10:15 on a Saturday night," as the old Cure song goes, and I thought I'd take a couple of minutes to write about my day.
It was a beautiful day here in south-central Pennsylvania, and I took advantage of that, plus the fact that we actually had no specific plans this weekend (a rarity!), to do some work in my poor neglected flowerbeds. Last year I never even got around to planting any flowers in them, which disappointed me, so I'm determined to do better this year.
So far, I'm off to a pretty good start. This morning I went to Lowe's and bought 36 packs of pink and white vinca plants. I always plant vinca in my flowerbeds because I like the colors of the flowers, the leaves are a nice glossy dark green, and most importantly, they do well in sunny, hot, and dry conditions. So if we get a dry spell in the middle of the summer, like we often do, they hold up pretty well. Here's an example of some vinca plants in case you aren't familiar with what they look like. The ones I got this year are the lighter pink color, and also white.
I also got 36 packs of celosia. I had these two years ago, the last time I planted annuals, and they were also nice, although at that time I only got yellow ones, and this year I got a variety: yellow, pink, and red. Celosia grows taller than vinca, so it looks nice planted in a row behind the vinca. Here's an example of what celosia plants look like, which basically look just like the ones I got:
Unfortunately, I couldn't just start digging holes and planting the flowers right away; I had to do some cleanup work first. My flowerbeds still contained the (wilting) leaves of the daffodils and tulips from the spring, as well as a few weeds, of course. My original flowerbed wasn't really in very bad condition, but my newer - and larger - one had many more weeds, as well as lots of stray grass. And the one along the side of the house - ugh. I really need to just plant some small bushes or perennials on that side, because I don't have much there but weeds and grass sticking up through the mulch. So it really needs something, but I don't really like to be bothered with it, since it's on the side of the house and isn't as visible. But that probably won't be happening anytime in the very near future.
Anyhow, after working from 1:30 to 4:30 this afternoon, I had filled a large garbage bag with plant leaves, weeds, and grass, and all my flowerbeds were ready for me to plant some flowers. But by that time, I was ready to quit for the day - I just didn't feel like starting on the job of planting 72 packs of flowers. I did water them as they sat in their market packs, eagerly waiting to occupy their new location, but then I went inside to wash off all the dirt (and sunscreen - yes, I learned my lesson after last week's sunburn) and talk about our evening plans.
After I showered, Brian asked me, "For dinner tonight, would you like to go somewhere that serves good wings?" I said, "Sure!" So after I got ready, we drove to Mt. Holly Springs to a little bar/restaurant called Three Pines. It's kind of a biker bar, but Brian's friend had told him they have really good wings. And he was right! They have 25 different sauces for their wings. We got some with Honey BBQ and some with Teriyaki. We liked both flavors, but the Teriyaki ones did get to be a bit much after a while, so it was good we got a smaller quantity of them. I had a small salad along with my wings (I had to have at least some vegetables with my meal), and Brian got some "Beef Veggie" soup (as it was written on the chalkboard of daily specials) which he said was pretty good.
After dinner, even though we didn't need them, we went down the street and got ice cream sundaes. We were going to get CMP's (Chocolate, Marshmallow, and Peanuts, for those not familiar with them), but they only came in a "Super" size, and we really didn't want anything that big. So Brian got a regular sundae with chocolate and marshmallow sauce (no peanuts), and I also got a regular one, but with hot fudge and marshmallow sauce.
On the way home, Brian asked, "Would you like to do some karaoke once we get home?" I replied with a resounding "Yes!" For Brian's birthday, I got him the Xbox 360 video game called "Lips," which is basically a karaoke game. It comes with a pretty good variety of songs, and there are more available to download on Xbox Live, and more songs are added about every week.
We sang everything in "Co-Op mode," which meant we took turns singing part of the time (usually the verses) and sang together some of the time (usually the choruses). I have to say, we make an excellent singing duo! For three of the songs we sang, we scored so well that we ranked in the top 50 singers - worldwide! So of course we were pretty proud of ourselves.
And that brings us to the present time. I guess now I'd better go get ready for bed, since I have a lot of planting to do tomorrow - plus we do want to try to get in a bike ride before the weekend is over!
