Good News!

Where to start? Sister's blue bird family had a second go around and so far so good (picture courtesy of said Sister)- Ma, Pa and 5 babies are doing well-Yeah!!! My Gruss an Aachen rose has a bud!!! Yeah!!! My mystery-Sweet Promise rose has a tiny bud too- Stay tuned to find out if it is acutually a Sweet Promise or if they mystery continues. Mystery plant (came with the house) has buds on it. I think it's a hydrangea but as it's never bloomed, I'm not really sure. I found out from my MIL that one of my other mystery plants is a Potentilla. Good to know! I like that one. Mystery Foxglove has been tentatively idetified as either "Candy Mountain"-spitting image but doesn't "turn it's blossoms up to the sun" or the Camelot series Rose.

I've been making a concerted effort to check out all the local nurseries. Upstate Gardener's Jounal did a bang-up job cataloging the places on the east side of the city. Luckily a lot of them are right around my area. I was very impressed with Lucas. There I got 6 -4" pots of creeping thyme to plant amongst my pavers for the low-low price of $5.60. I've planted half of them so far. They look a little fatigued but I think they'll make it. Hopefully it'll take and I'll have nice thyme growing between the flagstones instead of weeds! I also got some Serrano chile plants-some how I got them confused with Aneheim a nice mild chile -Serrano are 5x hotter than jalepenos-Whoops!

I had to go to Buffalo this week for work. I decided to stop at a really large gardening store on the west side on the way home- it was humongus! At first I thought: UH-oh this is going to be very dangerous... but I was able to control myself. I stuck to the list: potting soil and new gardening gloves. In the end I wasn't really impressed with the place for a few reasons: There were no birds or butterflies to be found. It smelled like chemicals (probably the reason I didn't see any birds or butterflies). Prices weren't any better than any other place. Selection wasn't nearly as good as some of the smaller places -they had a lot of stuff but it was a lot of the same stuff and pretty pedestrian at that-impatiens, geraniums by the acre. The place was so huge it was overwhelming. I do have to say they had a nice selection of landscaping bushes and pots. The staff wasn't terribly helpful or friendly. There were many bunches of kids standing around chatting. One nice kid put the bag of potting soil into the cart for me. Check out was painful 2 registers were open and they both had a hang up for some reason or another. When I checked out the cashier was too busy chatting with her coworker to even acknowlege me and as a result I was left on my own to wrangle the bag of potting soil into my car-It was a bulky 25-30lb bag and I was wearing heels and a business suit. I managed and didn't mess up my suit-Yeah!!!

Friends of ours just bought a new house in the city and moved in last weekend. It's a beautiful old house with a wonderful established garden complete with fruit trees and a pond. They don' t know anything about gardening and asked for help. I copied and printed some articles from old gardenig magazines about basic stuff and stuff specific to what they have in their yard and I found a nice book that should work as a good reference. It looks like the neighborhood has quite a few accomplished gardeners living there, and with gardeners being notoriously nice and helpful, I think they are in good shape.

Camera is still on the fritz and is probably dead. Hence the bluebird photo.

I place my Heritage Rose and Eden Rose in head to head combat last week here are the results:
Scent- Heritage by a landslide, vase life-Eden, maintenance-Eden (heritage has an aphid problem). Eden wins by a hair but the scent of Heritage makes it closer that it looks! Eden doesn't really smell like anything.

What's blooming: Lady's mantle, Yarrow, foxglove, delphinium, roses, spiderwort, potentilla, clematis

What's budding-Buddeleia, rudbeckia, echinacea, mystery plant (hydrangea?)