I needed some pine needle mulch for the blueberries I obtained from Almost Eden. They are more productive with acid soil, and pine needles help that develop. I wanted to plant them with peat moss, but only had peat compost, which neutral.
I coveted our neighbor's needles, so I asked their teen son to provide some. Our helper got some, but they were not enough.
Our neighbor thinks of the needles as a pain, since they are always falling and never really go away.
On Saturday the teen asked if I still wanted some. I said yes and he brought bags of them with his sister. Pine needle bags are very light, so they carried groups of bags in each hand. His sister said, "Do you want us to empty them?" All three of us began dumping needles on the blueberries until most of the bags were emptied.
I am keeping the rest as a Strategic Reserve, against the day when I want some in portable packages. I also have pinecones from their yard, which they gave away at their yard sale.
I sent them home with a Double Delight rose stem for their mother, who told me, "Roses are hard to grow." I told her at the yard sale, "Not at all." If Gurney's comes through with $5 roses again next spring, I will have some for our helper and that family, with some instructions on rose care.
Five neighbors on our street have enjoyed roses from the Jackson Rose Farm.
Latest Developments
I cut out all the KnockOut rose blooms, from every single plant, just as we trimmed the Crepe Myrtle plant of all its blooms. Most of the Crepe Myrtle blooms were going to seed.
The Crepe Myrtle sent out a single feathery bloom after the cutting and began producing new buds for an entire second bloom.
The KnockOut roses immediately began to send up new growth branches, which are often red/green, easy to spot. The growth of these bushes continues to astonish me. I expect they will be in full bloom when Team Jackson has another cookout.
Tomatoes will ripen another month before it freezes here. Now we are getting quite a few green ones for the ripening box, which I fill with green tomatoes, changing ones, and apples and bananas to help ripen them with ethelyne gas.
The paper said today that thousands of purple martens roosted in Little Rock for a time and left. That tells me we will have a tough winter. Birds are still almost absent in our yard. The same front page featured a story on the state releasing parisitoid wasps to deal with the Ash Borer, a pest that is eliminating a prized tree in the state.
