I Will Survive!

ha HAH! Intuitive Gardening at its finest! Here she is, the one (of two), the beautiful... Miss "Iceberg"! The only one that Mr. I Hate Roses I Like To Drown and Mutilate Living Things Around Our Yard aka my husband will grudgingly admit he likes. Love the lovely roses!

Hadn't Killed Anything in a While

But... goodbye bacopa, goodbye alyssum, goodbye one of my poinsettias! How was I supposed to know that the hard little thing at the base was peat, and that it needed to be soaked? Well, it's survival of the fittest around here, and your twin seems to have figured it out just fine. So there.
In happier news... 4 days ago, Cinco de Mayo's blooms faded to pale lavender, but the new blooms turned bright orange in the sudden cold snap, and it looks cute, no other word for it. And yes under 70 degrees is a cold snap, duh. Also, Ruby Meidiland is finally putting out shoots, plus there is new growth all over the Icebergs, hooray!

You Make My Heart Sing!

You make everything... groovy! Yes I'm talking to you Cinco de Mayo. What a show, and the blooms last for a week, amazing given the heat and the wind here in sunny old southern california. So if you are powerless against those seductive catalog descriptions, go ahead and just give in, you won't be disappointed. Unless you don't like ruffled blooms all over your roses in the spring, then I just don't know what to tell you...

Tough Love

One of my roses is drooping, and I am much afflicted by this. It (also known as "she") and her sister are both "icebergs" recently purchased and repotted to 15 gallon pots, and both have been treated for powdery mildew with a combination rose food-fungicide-insecticide. I feel now that I might have been too hasty in blasting them with that, and maybe should have tried a baking soda/dish soap combo, but oh well. If my yard is covered in dead ladybugs I'll know why.

But I digress. In the interest of saving it, I decided to start hacking away at it yesterday to see what happens. Henceforward this type of decision will be referred to as The Intuitive Gardening Method.

I brought these lovely girls home precisely BECAUSE they were "icebergs", which I consider to be maintenance-free roses here in LA. I believe this to be true because 1) I planted two of them in my mom's yard a couple of years ago and forgot all about them and they did not die, and 2) now they are huge monsters covered in white flowers most of the year, and have become a favorite backdrop for picture-taking. However, I noticed when repotting these new ones that their roots seemed underdeveloped, so I cut off all stems showing powdery mildew and then some. Surely they will get with the program when they realize how much I care about them.

I Love Them But I Kill Them

But I don't mean to, really I don't. I love them so much, their sweet chubbiness, their cheerfulness, their companionship. How can you resist them, so friendly and nonthreatening, and so inexpensive, with no scary unpronounceable names... no names at all really, so that it's no big deal to just bring them home, and let them REFUSE TO STAY ALIVE for you! Thanks to them, I have been forced to find solace on the internet, so you can thank them the next time you see them at your local nursery or supermarket, these fiends of the plantworld, who have driven me to launch my inadequacies upon the blogosphere. I, who have done nothing but scoff at the internet from the time of its inception, with its unbearable timesucking qualities and its degenerative effects on the modern world, now spend the majority of my time on it trying to find the magic answer to keeping plants alive. Pictures of the aforementioned offenders to follow shortly...