Deirdre's Garden Diary: 2007 February March

:: February-March 2007 ::
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:: 03.24.07 ::

Too Much Of A Good Thing?

Last year I was driving around town with my mom running errands and we got lost. I turned down a side street near a deserted shopping area as we tried to make our way back around to the main highway. The buildings on both sides of the street were vacant mega stores and derelict real estate up for sale.

The large empty parking lots had small landscaped medians long ago forgotten, and there, on the grassy strip between the rows of empty parking spaces and the street, I found a bad landscape decision gone awry...huge heaping masses of overgrown bushes threatening to eat up the road, the cars, and anything else that would get in their way...it was Lady Banks Rose gone wild and out of control.

I went back this year with my camera to see if these garden giants were still there. Sure enough as I made my way around the corner I saw overflowing heaps of yellow and white blooms screaming out for attention. They were thriving profusely without having had any care for years, slowly taking over the parking lot and growing up into the trees nearby. (This photo only shows one "clump", there are more behind me and further down past this one.)

Most of the bushes are yellow, but there are clumps of white scattered in among them. I made a whole truck load of cuttings to haul home. I snipped them up and put them in vases all over the house, now there are overflowing flower arrangements in every room. I am also attempting to propagate some of the cuttings. I hope I can get them to take root otherwise I might just have to go back with a helper and try to dig up one of these monsters. They are so beautiful.

If you are in the Fort Worth area you can find this mound of beauty by taking the Cherry Lane exit from I30 near White Settlement. Go North and take the first right onto Scott Street. You can't miss them!
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:: 03.05.07 ::

Got Weeds?

I went to Alice Carlson today to get in some of my volunteer hours for the Master Gardener Program. They had me weed the dry creek bed. Above is the before and after shot. I spent about three hours on it and only got half way down the creek from the bridge on the right side. The larger weeds were actually easiest to pull out...it was the tiny little weeds with long roots and grass runners that were the stubborn ones.

I like sitting and weeding, it's meditative, and the weather was cool and sunny. However my butt is a little sore from scooting around on all those rocks! Next time I will try to remember to bring a cushy pad!
Even so, it was a good day and I enjoyed being there.
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:: 03.01.07 ::

Snip-itty Snip

This week the Master Gardener Interns spent the day at the Resource Connection. We started out by attending the monthly Master Gardener meeting and then finished off with some light pruning around the building.

I enjoyed the meeting a lot. They had a guest speaker, Mark Whitfield, from Lavender Ridge Farms. It was nice to know that it is possible to grow lavender in Texas under the right conditions and it gave me some hope that in the future I might be able to finally establish the lavender plants in my garden as a perennial. Their farm is open to the public and you can cut fresh wild flowers right from their fields (cup seen in photo). They also have lots of handmade lavender goodies for sale.

One dangerous thing about the monthly meeting though...they had plants for sale. Darn them! Talk about entrapment. No, I wasn't able to resist. Yes, I bought plants.

Here is my score for the day (trays in back of photo)...creeping phlox, lambs ear, chocolate mint, curry plant, sedum, mullein and two that I already forgot what they are! I also got a bag of echinacea seeds for free. I really wanted some columbine and some lemon grass but it got snatched up before I could get to it. Next time though...

The tray in the front of the picture is my score from the farmer supply when I went shopping the day before. I picked up some things for the veggi garden... red leaf lettuce, some cucumber and zucchini, a few banana peppers and a couple of tomato plants that they already had out!

We finished off the day with a tree pruning demo. Master Gardener Interns Louise and Loma, seen below, were relentless with their loppers and clippers...

Hack Hack! We took turns snipping away at the rose bushes and carrying off the thorny limbs. Tip for the day...it helps to have thick gardening gloves when pruning rose bushes. Yes, that means I will be doing more garden shopping in the near future.

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:: 02.07.07 ::

Field Trip
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The Master Gardener Interns had our first field trip today. We went to five Demonstration Gardens located in the Fort Worth area ...all places where we can do some of our required volunteer service once we complete the instructional classes.

The first two gardens we visited were the South West Sub-Courthouse and the South West Fort Worth Regional Library. Both had a medium size garden space using all xeriscape and native Texas plants.

Although it is still winter and the plants are dormant, there was still a lot of very interesting things to see. There was a large variety of textures and even some winter color accents such as the coral honeysuckle above. I got a lot of great photos, you can see more of them (including larger sizes) HERE on my Flickr page.

Our third stop was at Alice Carlson near the TCU campus. They had a much larger garden space and a wider variety of plants including some vegetables, and an area of sunken container pools for growing aquatic plants.

From there we went to Thistle Hill. They have been doing some restoration on the inside of the house and are now trying to restore the heirloom plants around this historic site. Finally our tour took us to the Union Gospel Mission downtown. It is hard to tell from the street, but once you are on the property there are lots of landscape areas around the buildings. The goal here is to to create a peaceful environment for residents of the mission.

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