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!

Picture This entry for May

My entry to Gardening Gone Wild's Picture This contest for May is below:  The iris 'Victoria Falls,' with its throne revealed after a walk up the velvety-blue corridor and the cellular structure of the cathedral awning above.

Morden Sunrise Glorius

I present to you this morning a rose that I allowed a prime space in my beds, but one that has never been quite satisfying enough for me.  Somewhat rare, I obtained the Canadian rose 'Morden Sunrise' in 2002, just a few years after its 1999 introduction by the Morden Experimental Station.

'Morden Sunrise' is a somewhat-yellow flowered Parkland Rose. Actually, the official description of "yellow flowered" is pityingly inadequate to describe the colors of this rose, and it is the marvelous color of this rose that makes it worthwhile to keep.  In my garden, the blooms vary in all colors of orange and yellow, with an occasional pink blush thrown in.  The orange and pink seem to predominate during cooler spring weather, with yellow more prevalent in the summer doldrums.  The bloom form is uninspiring to me, semidouble, with only 8 petals, produced in clusters of 4-8, and it is mildly fragrant, but the delicate nature of the blooms makes it up.

'Morden Sunrise' stands as a specimen plant in my front landscaping, but, although her bloom is pleasant, it has not quite provided the spectacular show I had hoped for. My main knock against this rose is that it seems to lack a certain amount of vigor. I nursed it for several years, expecting it to either die or get over whatever was holding it back, but its basic nature is unchanged even though this year is the healthiest I've yet seen the rose. It just doesn't do a lot of growing during the season, nor does it bloom so profusely that it will just "wow" the gardener.

'Morden Sunrise' is reportedly hardy to zone 3, but she occasionally has a little tip dieback here in Zone 5b.  The bush has  a vase-like shape and erect stems to about 2.5 feet in my climate.  The foliage is shiny, dark green and very resistant to blackspot and mildew and she doesn't need sprayed.  It was a complex cross of Rosa arkansana, 'Assiniboine', 'Sunsprite', 'White Bouquet', 'Fire King', and 'Prairie Princess', so maybe the problem is that all that heritage was just a little too mixed up. 

Anyway, for those rosarians out there who have been thinking of giving her a try, if you like the blooms of 'Westerland' and 'Alchymist', then 'Morden Sunrise' is worth a spot in your garden.  But if you want a rose to draw visitors from the street, she probably won't pull in the bystanders, however beautiful she is.

Gas-astrophe

I was suspicious before, but am now convinced, that the biggest impediment to successful gardening is not drought, or wind, or weeds, or blazing sun.  It is surely the gardener's family and other unnecessary hangers-on.

Allow me to provide a timely pertinent example.  Last night, when my daughter was returned by a shaggy-haired but amiable creature she refers to as her boyfriend, they had driven around so much that she was afraid that he wouldn't have sufficient fuel to make it to a gas station.  Since my daughter's curfew is long after her gardening father is soundly nestled in dreams of formal rose gardens, my wife wisely chose not to awaken me for such a dire need, but she then proceeded to move from the merely inadvisable to the completely unthinkable.  She entered my domain of tools and associated man-stuff and gave my beloved 5-gallon gas can, which contained a couple of errant gallons of gas, to the boyfriend and my daughter to add to his car.

This morning, as we were waking, She Who Steals Gas Cans (Mrs. ProfessorRoush) mentioned to me that she wasn't sure they had put the "lid" back on right.  Sure enough, I went out to find that the first (lower) cap containing the spout was in place, but the upper cap, the one that actually seals the can, was missing.  I located it in the driveway, destroyed from being driven over, as pictured at the right above.

God evidently thinks that it is not enough of a trial that the other inhabitants of my household destroyed a critical part to an heirloom gas can that I have successfully used and cared for over 20 years. It is now evident to me, after an exhaustive search around town, that all gas cans are now sold with a #(*@&$ CARB-complaint nozzle that helps you spill gas all over creation.  "CARB," if you're not aware, stands for "California Air Resources Board," a group who has evidently conspired to create self-venting and self-sealing standards for gas cans that make it impossible to actually get the gas out of the can. So, once again, thank you, California, for taking the lead to screw up and regulate another simple process because of a minor percentage of idiots on the planet.  I had to purchase one of these spouts recently on a kerosene container so I could douse and burn a few cedar stumps.  The "non-spillable" spout leaked so much kerosene everywhere that every time I lit the match to burn a stump, I was unsure if just the stump or also my pants and shoes were going to go up in flames.  It makes for some interesting dance steps for fire-starting, I'll guarantee you.

 So, having already searched the local hardware and big-box stores for a non-CARB-compliant gas can, I spent the morning wandering nomad-like among garage sales, a modern Diogenes searching not for an honest man, but for a gardener-friendly gas can.  I finally gave up and found them for sale on the Internet (GOING FAST!) for $30.00, approximately 5 times the cost of the CARB cans found locally, but worth every penny. I briefly considered sinking my entire retirement fund into hoarding the remaining planetary supply of these essential pieces of plastic, but ultimately I planned to buy three; one to use and two to keep hidden and locked away in the attic.  I figured that, given that I'm 52 years old, at an average 20 years use, if the final can got destroyed after I'm 90 it would be somebody else's turn to fill the lawn mower anyway.  Alas, when I hit the "purchase button" they were "out of stock."  Evidently they did GO FAST!  In the meantime, I can't think of a decent garden use for my old friend, so I've given it an honest burial in the garden, singing "In the Sweet By and By" to it so as to complete a heart-rending ritual known only to modern, middle-aged, gardening fathers.