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| Heirloom Rose fragrance is potent enough to make someone cough. |
Two tools used by the Jackson ICU team are:
- Rain
- Wood Mulch, plus other mulches - leaves, dead weeds.
We often have too much rain in the spring, with oozing mud and a lake in the back yard (no interior flooding). But no one knows when the last good rain has left the area.
I love rain for soaking bare root roses, new roses, and stressed bushes. They can soak for a week if given sun for the branches.
Young plants arrive by mail, parched by the trip. The first job is lining them up in a bucket or wheelbarrow for a rainwater soak. Overnight is way too long, though I did that with Bee Balm and it survived...barely. Most plants are ready to go after a rainwater soak, indicating which is the root and which is the stem, within an hour. Some plants arrive as a ball or so tiny, that some clues help.
A plant - simply dug into the ground and watered - is going to be donating water to the dry soil. However, if the rose or new plant is already soaked, then watered after planting, a larger volume of damp soil will support growth instead of drawing that rainwater away.
Everyone knows by now - rain is liquid fertilizer, safe and always effective. A chemical engineer showed me how to put dry fertilizer into the hole dug for roses (?!) and plant it in that toxic-for-roses environment. I never bought a bag of fertilizer, but I did find horse manure and brought it back in a pickup truck. The trick is to praise horses until someone says, "People raise horses near us."
I gave a bunch of manure to a neighbor and he then snow-plowed our sidewalks all winter for free.
Mulches
Weeds may simply be plants yearning to do something more useful in life. A stand of crab grass is actually a grain product and prolific in its production. If cardboard is placed on it and mulch over that, the entire plant will feed the soil, its green leaves providing nitrogen quite a bit slower than rain, but still free.
I get tall pasture grass weeds growing in the garden from birds feeding in one area and fertilizing in another. I had a massive bunch near a rose, so I put cardboard down and a bag of wood mulch on top, almost completely opaque. That weed patch decomposed to feed the bush, and the bush grew instead of being engulfed by pasture grass.
A partial bag is only $1, which is a lot less work than weeding and always good for the soil.
