A Summer Carol

Twas the end times of summer and all through the beds,
Was a sighing of hope that the Dog Days had fled.

The garden was weeded and mulch was all down,
The rains filled the potholes and   joy did abound.

Baby roses were nestled all snug and secured,
In milk jugs aplenty, their safety assured.

Mrs. ProfessorRoush in her afghan, and I with my shovel, preparing for winter to come to our hovel.

Well, I guess the poetry just falls apart at the mere mention of Mrs. ProfessorRoush. 

What you are glimpsing in the picture to the right is the start of a new bed, with some baby Griffth Buck roses spaced out and covered by my usual milk-jug protectors.  This is how I plant all rose bands these days, hard-won knowledge bought at the feet of many, many dead little roses.  The milk jugs are my catchall protection equipment, providing increased humidity and some shade to the roses through the still-hot and sunny days here, and then later, as Fall wears on, giving them some protection from the cold nights and winds.  I'll gradually cut these down a bit as the roses acclimate to provide them some extra sun and air movement, but I keep a tall collar in place to discourage rabbits and rodents from chewing these greenlings down to their base.  As the temperatures approach freezing at night, I'll substitute glass cloches for the milk jugs to give them some extra protection against the worst of Winter. 

I prefer Fall for planting these days, giving the plants time to develop good roots before Winter.  The quick Kansas Springs give way too soon to Summer's heat, leaving spring-planted shrubs gasping for moisture and support.  Planted here are Quietness, Queen Bee, Chorale, Gentle Persuasion, Prairie Clogger, Prairie Lass, September Song, Silver Shadows, Summer Wind, Paloma Blanca, Survivor, and, as usual for me, an unknown band.  The unknown band is from my trial of a new rooting method this summer.  I immediately forgot what variety I took the cuttings from and, of course, it rooted handily.  Hopefully I can identify it in a few years when it reaches mature bloom.  Or not.

A Little Whitewash

We've now had 6 inches of rain in the past 6 days, the weather has turned cold again, and my  roses, at peak bloom, are drowned and misshapen.  You can stop now, God, and I promise I'll stop complaining about the lack of rain around here for awhile.

But I will take advantage of the lousy weather and lack of decent rose pictures to slip a little gardening tip into the blog.  I've written previously about obtaining some nice glass cloches last January that I was, and am now, immensely proud of.  They served me well through a frigid winter and a cold and unpredictable Spring here in Kansas until a few weeks ago, when the weather hit the 80's.  I found then that some of the new roses were getting a little bit "burnt" in them.  And no wonder, because I found later that a clear glass cloche in my garden, at an ambient air temperature of 81F on noon of a clear sunny day, has an interior temperature, measured by my soil thermometer, of 140F!  Time for the cloches to come off, but the weather has been so variable, and with night temperatures reaching into the 40's, that I really didn't want to keep them off, nor did I want to be running around every day and night covering and uncovering them.

So, when the rose leaves began to fry a little, I got it into my head that I could whitewash the cloches, just like K-State does its glass greenhouses.  I did a quick search around town for some plain old whitewash, thinking that a little "shading" would improve the problem, and came up empty.  So I turned to the Internet, the modern Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, and came up with a simply made whitewash formula.  After coating the interior of the cloches with my homemade whitewash, as shown above, the interior temperature on the same sunny day was only 98F, a vast improvement and survivable by the roses, particularly during weeks like this, where the high temperatures have been in the 70's recently, the nights in the 50's, and it has rained for days.

Remember fellow gardeners, cloches are just mobile greenhouses and whitewash does wonders for the plants under the glass.  The formula, cut down to a small, manageable amount, is below:

3 parts hydrated lime

1 part salt
8 parts water

If you substitute the word "cups" for "parts" above, it will make about a half-gallon of whitewash, which goes a long way, so you can cut it down if you need less (that's why I converted the recipe to "parts").    Be careful to mix in small amounts of each ingredient slowly, so that the powdery lime doesn't just clump up and become hard to stir. It was recommended to let it sit overnight, but I used it immediately and it seemed to work well. It's fairly watery when mixed, but remember it is a wash, not a paint.  I did use a paintbrush to slop it on the interior of the glass, though.  So nice to "paint" and not worry about how much I drip on the ground!

Cloche Encounters of the Fourth Kind

If I were Catholic and this was a confessional, I'd have to admit here that I've long had a hankering to obtain and use a real cloche in my garden.  Hankering?  Okay, call it a barely controllable lust. Pictures of beautiful classic bell-shaped glass cloches placed over perfect green tender foliage always light my soul on fire.  I've never, however, been able to physical and financially acquire the real thing, substituting instead plastic milk jugs or recycled bottles of large size when I needed protection for baby plants. I've always viewed the latter as poor tradeoffs, about as rewarding as eating dinner with your sister instead of dancing the night away with Marilyn Monroe.  Real, heavy, gorgeous glass cloches, though, have always been just too expensive for my budget.

 

Up until now, that is.  This weekend I wandered into the local Hobby Lobby to find that their large clear glassware, including two large heavy glass cloches, were all on sale for 50% off.  If I borrow J. Allen Hynek's classification for UFO encounters, I therefore just had a cloche encounter "of the fourth kind," or one that involved abduction (me) into the world of the Cloche.  Many gardeners have had a cloche encounter of the first kind (where they might have glimpsed one at a distance) or of the second kind (actually up close and warming the earth beneath it) or even the third kind (with a  tender plant actually covered and being protected by a cloche), but few are lucky enough to be proud glass cloche owners.  I joined that group with a quick local purchase and then added three more cloches from a weekend trip that included a visit to two more regional Hobby Lobby stores. so I now have a thriving set of cloche quintuplets inhabiting my garden.

And just in time.  The first snow of the season hit Kansas on Monday, as the pictures of these 16 inch tall cloches illustrate (the second with a little snow knocked-off so you can see it better).  Somewhere beneath the drifts, my glass sanctuaries already protect some fall-planted Gallica bands hybridized by Paul Barden and a rooted 'Prairie Harvest' start from last spring.  And my winter landscape looks a little less like a milk-jug garden and more like somebody is gardening with a little class.

Cloche is the French word for "bell," referring to the classic shape.  For those uninitiated, a cloche acts like a miniature cold frame, controls temperature and humidity around young plants, and protects them against insects, wind, frost, hail, turkeys, and wayward dogs. The Internet describes the real cloche as being either of vague French origin or as having been invented in Italy in 1623, but my bet is on the French because of the name and because a plant in the French climate is more likely to need the protection than one in Tuscany.  Many gardeners, like myself, have rationalized for years that plastic milk jugs and jars are adequate and perhaps even preferable, but all of us know, deep down, that a good, heavy glass cloche is what we have always really craved.  There are commercial bell-shaped plastic garden cloches available at reasonable prices, and one can make a decent home-made garden cloche that looks nice, but in my Kansas winds, I need something heavy enough to stay put instead of tumbling along to the Atlantic.  Besides, I'm tired of picking up pieces of weathered, shattered milk jugs from my mulch.  

So, if you're also seeking a cloche encounter of the fourth kind, watch for the next Hobby Lobby sale cause this one ended last weekend. If you're in Kansas, you are just out of luck anyway since I bought all the cloches currently available in the state.