I have the whole glorious day before me! Beautiful weather (though insanely dry this month), heavenly boost to the morning with my breakfast ritual...
A hug for Millie for surviving two weeks in her onesies...
And a trip to Happy Dogz, with Millie, leaping and raring to go play with her pup friends (I'm told she has many).
And now I have five roses that should go in. The holes are mostly dug out for them. Exciting!
But is it? For one thing, do I really have a whole day before me? I never have a whole day before me. If I looked forward to working with those roses, I must have been blocking the fact that I had a dental appointment at 9 (part two of this tooth saga and it will continue, because I come from a time and place where teeth were never given the stuff they needed to look American straight, white, and shiny. That appointment took forever! And I needed to do the weekly grocery run, because if not now, when Millie is in doggie daycare, then when?
Unpacking, putting away. So... maybe half a day before me? Not even. Working with roses is not like working with other perennials. You don't shake them out of a pot and slide them into place. And my roses are bare twigged but large. I learned to work with them wearing these.
And the holes need adjustment, and the soil needs to be mixed with the compost, and carrying soil back and forth and trimming broken twigs and finally placing them just so and then filling those very large holes, and finally watering them, very very slowly, for at least 15 minutes and yes, I see those drooping flowers nearby -- I really need to water those as well or I will lose them!
Two roses in. Say what? Its 3 o'clock already? Off I go quickly, so quickly, to dump compost, pick up dirt, dump cardboard, pick up corn and finally -- pick up Snowdrop.
Well, I can look at it this way: two down and only twelve roses to go (not all are here yet). Well, and one lilac and one mock orange. So I guess the number remains stuck at fourteen. Make that fifteen. I ended up with another mockorange today. Maybe I'll work on putting them in on one of those days that seems so open on the calendar (but in reality, is really quite full), and maybe not even then because there's watering, which just sucks up any time I may have left over for gardening.
We pick up Millie, I take Snowdrop home, Millie says hi to the boys, we go home.
As I take stock outside, and find that the soil is dry again two inches deep on plants that were just soaked yesterday, I have to wonder -- what did people in Giverny do this year, when temperatures repeatedly crossed 100F/38C? What did they do??
Flower growing is becoming a challenge. I am up for it, but only because I am retired and occasionally I do have a couple of hours to plant... two roses. Only two, but two it is.
with so much love...
