Yesterday was a good gardening day. It was warm enough to work in a short sleeve t-shirt while pruning roses (ouch!). Here are things I accomplished in the garden: Pruned the Ruby Meidiland roses in front to about 18″ high. Planted the English daisies and pansies I bought last week along the front walkway. Cut out the dead remains of last year’s chrysanthemums and asters along the front walk. Pruned the Arctic blue willow bush by the driveway. Pruned the linden tree. Pruned one of the cherry trees, and the other one looks like it doesn’t need any. I put…
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Yesterday at Home Depot, I bought some flowers (my daughter Hannah was with me and she complained that I must be addicted to gardening or something). I got some yellow and some purple pansies and some white and some pink-to-purple English daisies. I also bought two bare-root roses at Wal-Mart. The roses are a floribunda called ‘Nearly Wild.’ They grow only 2-3 feet tall and spread out about 3 feet. I’m going to put them as specimen plantings up among the aspen trees when I cover that area with weed blocking fabric and compost or bark. They’ll add some interest…
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I don’t think I’ll go to another Thanksgiving Point garden mini-expo. It was much too basic. If you’re a guy like me who reads garden books and magazines and has tried a lot of things in the garden, there just wasn’t much to learn. They had people teaching who were trying to earn their master gardener certification, which requires some volunteer hours. It was clear that some of them did not feel comfortable teaching and were only doing it to earn their hours. I wish they had an advanced level of classes. It would have been good to learn more…
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Earlier this week, I took the jiffy pellets with the white coneflower seeds and put them in a different tray that’s on the heating pad and is still covered. That did the trick, and within seven days, many of them are sending out roots now. The salvias are finally starting to grow more, so they are developing larger true leaves (not just the seed leaves, or whatever you call those first two that emerge from the seed and later drop off). I moved the poppies off the heating pad, because they seem to like cooler temperatures. The coreopsis plants are…
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Here’s a response to that GardenWeb.com posting from someone who lives in zone 6 in New Jersey: RE: Camellias in Zone 6 (Utah)? Posted by: ermazi z6, NJ. (My Page) on Tue, Mar 21, 06 at 17:23 April series could be what you need. However, they do not flower from Jan. to March in zone 6, instead they may just start flowering at the end of April.You need to set some protection on them for the first few years. And you may also need to find some acid compost under old, big pines to change your soil. Here’s something from the…
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I posted a message to Gardenweb.com to see what people think of these cold-hardy camellias. We’ll see what they say. Also, I found a nursery website with a lot of information about camellias, including cold-hardy ones. It’s Camellia Forest at http://www.camforest.com.
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This is awesome! There are camellias that I can grow here in zone 6! I didn’t know that. Here’s one I really like: SPRING`S PROMISE ICE ANGELS(R) CAMELLIA
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I just installed an online task list for my garden tasks. It’s cool. Click the link on the sidebar to see it. There are a lot of things I need to do in the next few weeks! My seeds and seedlings are coming along well. I put some new white coneflower seeds on some of the jiffy pellets that aren’t producing poppies. I just did that two days ago. All the other little seedlings are growing as expected. I’m going to have a lot of coreopsis and white coneflower plants. Not enough salvias, though. Tomorrow, I’m going to a “Garden…