I realize it may be often boring when ProfessorRoush complains about the lack of rain in Kansas in the summer, but bear with me a minute, and I'll let you feel a bit of my pain, and then I'll throw in a gorgeous gratuitous rose picture to end on today on a (semi)-high note. Down and up, your emotions on a never-ending rollercoaster along with my Kansas blog.
Frustration, thy name is moisture. Necessary and welcome whenever, wetness in this area of the country is a gift, a blessing from the sky however and whenever it comes. I'm at the point of happily accepting the 80 mph winds and hailstorms and occasional sheltering in the basement as long as it brings rain. Since May 30th, we had not any rain in this area, a period of drought that denied daylilies and blackberries any chance for full development.
Worst of all, my weather app had promised a decent chance of rain every day this past 10 days. You would logically think that if there was a 30% chance of rain each day, it would rain one day in every three, correct? Well, in Manhattan Kansas, that logic doesn't compute. Oh, it rained on most days, it just rained all around us. After watching storms last week go around us, I started snapping screenshots of the radar this week for proof. I'm the blue dot in these shots, and the top photo is Tuesday, the second Thursday (flooding north, nothing on us), and this one at right is Friday morning. My weather app actually said it was sprinkling here Friday as I screenshot the radar. I evidently need a new weather app. Or my weather app needs to learn from its poor performance and improve.
Finally, Friday night this storm at the left developed in early evening and held true for a half inch of rain and then a second storm rolled over in the middle of the night and laid down another 1.5 inches. Saturday morning I could almost hear my buffalograss applauding as I stepped outside. I've now skipped two days of watering new roses and I think the browning grass is already greening up. If there's a bright side to the drought, the lawn didn't grow at all last week and so I can skip a week of mowing. That radar-imaged storm you see pictured at the left looked like this as it moved in:
Doesn't that look beautiful? I considered dancing naked in the rain, but realized the neighbors might talk.
In other news, I do have a number of new roses growing this summer,
courtesy of the Home Depot "Minor Miracle" that I wrote about earlier and this one is one of the new ones, a fabulous florescent orange-red semi-double that screams "watch me" in a exhibitionist display of pride. On the downside, I don't know what variety it really is. Two of the labeled Home Depot 'Hope for Humanity' roses look like this and they're obviously not 'Hope for Humanity'. My best guess is that I now have two
'Morden Fireglow', although the foliage seems more glossy than I remember that rose. In its favor, the stems are red like 'Morden Fireglow' and the color is so unique, it is hard for it to be anything else. Certainly, this isn't a reborn 'Tropicana' and time and winter hardiness may reveal its secret identity. Of similar concern is that the labeled 'Rugelda' I purchased appears to be a 'Hope for Humanity' instead. The 'Morden Sunrise' and 'Zephirine Drouhin' seem correct, so they're not all labeled wrong, but 'John Cabot' hasn't bloomed and isn't acting like a climber. Who knows what I've got?
I said I would end on a (semi)-high note, right? You didn't really expect a fully happy ending from this blog did you? After all the times you've been here? My mystery rose is a beautiful rose indeed and certainly provides some color to contrast the subtle daylilies, but is it really too much to expect that if I'm paying $13 or $14 for a big-box-store rose, it would be labeled correctly? How hard is that?
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