Want fabulous plants? You need healthy soil. While garden soil will never be glamorous, it is the foundation for our gardens. What you can see going on with your roses above the ground is largely determined by what goes on beneath your feet that is all but invisible to you. The conditions the roots of …
I love roses. There’s nothing quite like walking through the garden in May and feasting on a bonanza of beauty, color, form, and fragrance. To get a bounty of flowers, besides sun, water and good soil, roses need to be pruned. And now is prime pruning season. Even as an avid gardener, this is not …
Want to give your roses a slow deep watering, but aren’t ready for drip irrigation? A soaker hose might be the way to go. Most often made from recycled tires, the hoses’ rough surface contains millions of tiny pores that allows water to seep into the soil evenly and slowly. Available in a variety of …
With the last substantial rains being a distant memory, summer temperatures and low humidity are ideal conditions for spider mites – a scourge of the season for roses and lots of other plants. Spider mites are related to spiders and ticks. With eight legs and an oval body 1/20 of an inch-long, they look like …
We are lucky to be able to turn a faucet, flip a switch, or program a dial and get good quality water. At a cost. The price of water in Marin continues to increase, and with the tiered systems used by Marin water providers, the more you use the more it costs. More importantly, during …
Time – there never seems to be enough of it! I’m always looking for ways to better manage my time. While I love working in my garden, I’d like more time to simply enjoy it. That got me thinking about possible ways to give roses the care they need and conserve time and energy. Here …
I love April. A chickadee family has already moved into one of my birdhouses, there are daffodils, blossoming trees and birds singing everywhere. Now too, the roses have begun their season. Amazing to me that only weeks ago they looked like dead sticks and now they have the most beautiful shiny, lush green or red …
It’s a good time now to give your roses about two cups per plant of alfalfa either pellets (buy at a feed store) or meal (sold at some nurseries). Alfalfa is a great soil amendment and provides a bit of nutrition, it contains a growth hormone triacontanol which is said to be a plant growth …
Here in northern California, we prune roses from January until mid-February, putting our roses into dormancy to provide a good bloom cycle in the spring. Most of the varieties bloom on new growth. Remember the following: dead, diseased, crossing, and skimpy. Use these four words as a guide to remove canes for all hybrid teas, …
We’re deep into the winter pruning season. This is the brief period of time when roses in Marin go into semi-dormancy, and the best time to do your annual pruning. If you’re not quite done, or are just getting started, here are some things that may be of help: Learn How to Prune Roses in …