Why I Oughta...

A year and a month ago, I planted a pair of Crabapple trees along the side of our house on the southside.  After some hemming-and-hawing about what kind of trees I should plant in this spot (knowing I wanted to espalier them), I decided to plant Sugar Tyme Crabapple trees .  Why?  Because they're on the list of species that are both suitable for our Zone AND have 'excellent' disease resistance.  In the 13 months since planting, I've shown these trees in various posts - both about the trees as well as posts showing off the Disneyland Roses.  The most recent post was just last month when I was showing off the late-season blooms on the floribunda roses .    My plan for these is to create a Palmette Verrier shape , which calls for the bottom branches to be the longest, followed up each level with a shorter horizontal branch terminating in a vertical segment.  So far, I've trained out four levels on one of the trees and three levels on the second tre...

The journey this year with our three Disneyland Roses has been all about paying just.a.little.bit of attention to them.  Or at least MORE than I have ever done in years past.  It started with mulching them in to overwinter this past Winter.  Then, I transplanted the first one from the backyard to the southside bed before it broke dormancy .  I also decided to feed these roses - for the first time.  I used a bag of Jobe's Organics Knock-out Rose granular food and started the first feeding in late April ( posted in early May ).  Then, gave them a second feeding one month later - in late May ( posted here in late June, despite the feeding being in late May ).  Today, I'm posting in early July, but sharing a photo I took of the bag of rose fertilizer that I used in late June.   This was the third and final rose feeding of the season.  Late April, Late May, Late June.    When I was out there feeding the three roses - which have bl...

Last week, I posted a photo about our first Disneyland Rose and mentioned how I would get around to posting photos of the other two.  Welp, here's the post showing off the other two.  These were 10th Anniversary gifts from Nat's Mom and I planted them in October of last year .  October!  It was late, but that's when they were shipped to us.  I put them on the southside of our house , in the kind of narrow space between our house and our neighbor to the south.  The top photo shows the Disneyland Rose that I put in a little bit more oriented towards the back of our house.  It has blooms!  The photo below shows the other rose bush that I planted closer to the front of the house.  It does NOT have any blooms.  And in fact, it seems like half of the bush has perished (the back half), but the front half is full of green growth.  If go back and look at the original plants, you'll note that the one that is doing better *this yea...