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April 03, 2005
Here we go -- now it's on!
Well, the weather is finally breaking, and the temps have been above the freezing mark for at least a week. Good thing, since we bought one of the major living yard ornaments we'd had on the schedule for this year.
It's a weeping pussy willow. I've been thinking about doing this for a couple of years, since the first one I saw in a gardening catalog, but until we took the silver maples out, there wasn't anywhere to put any other high-sun plants. I may as well make the best of it, right?
Also, my three flowering almonds have shipped from Spring Hill, so I should get those via UPS or FedEx sometime later in the week. Presumably, they will come in pots and I can wait until next weekend to drop them in the ground.
We bought the pussy willow last Sunday, actually, at Siebenthaler. They'd just started hauling out their potted small trees for the season last week, we walked in five minutes to close and asked if they had any. They had one. And then they didn't -- it was the exact price I'd said I'd be willing to pay to buy one locally, you see. I could have ordered a smaller, younger one from Spring Hill for about two-thirds what I paid for the one at Siebenthaler, but ... and it's a big 'but' ... I'd have had to pay $25 to have it shipped from some warehouse down around Lawrenceburg, Indiana. That kind of put me off ordering it, you see. I actually got a bigger tree for the same price, this way, since it's an older speciment plant to begin with and shipping consisted of cramming the poor bastard into the RAV4 and driving a couple of miles.
I don't have any pictures of the sprouts, right now, and I'm not too optimistic about their health. It seems some kind of fuzzy mold -- whether from the pots and peat pellets themselves or the laundry room, I don't know -- has been sapping and killing a good many of them. The bluebonnets have all died but one, and it ain't lookin' too good either. I moved all the cayennes out into peat pots, though, and they look okay; the poblano peppers I seeded a couple of weeks late also have sprouted, so hopefully I can at least manage to nurse a few plants of each kind through the next couple of weeks, until I can set up cold frames and harden them to go in the containers.
I'm having a sort of health issue right now, though, and I'm afraid it might wind up with surgery and recuperation time, so this all could be moot anyway. Stay tuned! Until I know more, here's an 'arty shot' of the pussy willow:
Posted by Melinda at April 3, 2005 07:25 PM