A Year in Review…

Hello everyone, how are you holding up? I’ve got lots of photos and an update on the roses for you if you need a little break from everything. I thought to myself the other day, it’s really been a minute since my last year in review–In time and distance units, it’s been “two houses and a completely different” state ago–definitely long overdue. I’m going to break it down by season with a special section just to update on the situation with the roses. Let’s go!

LATE WINTER

The best thing we ever did for ourselves was install a wood stove. It was the last chance to apply for the tax credit so we went for it and we love it so much! It made winter so much cozier. We also experienced a bit of a puzzle madness, restored more of our original sash windows in our 1939 home, and, due to a critical plumbing issue, completely renovated the 1980’s bathroom by ourselves, right down to the studs. I’ll spare all of you the progress photos of the bathroom remodel since everything about it was so gross. But I do really like the tile we picked. It’s a Laura Ashley porcelain tile with a bit of marble trim.

PS: You already know about the Oak Tree Library we built but that also happened last winter. 🙂

SPRING

Spring was a bit of a mixed bag. (See section on the roses below.) But the foxglove looked incredible as did the clematis and I widened the front garden borders a wee bit. Sadly, our sweet Bonbon crossed the rainbow bridge in June. She was nine years old and had a wonderful, adventure filled life–living in two states and three homes! We miss that silly little bird so much.

SUMMER

No dahlias this year–the groundhog ate ALL OF THEM. But I did have some lovely cosmos.

these hollyhocks were supposed to be single yellows

selfie with the sweet peas (they weren’t great this year)

the slipcast mold was purchased on Etsy and I glazed it with Mayco glaze–this is pre-firing

The working title of my second novel is “Ghosts & Grannies” haha

Don’t let those few sunshiny photos fool you–it rained for most of the summer. Massive flooding. I’m talking record breaking, “have you seen the new water feature in our basement?” kind of rain. But we had some nice times, too, like a visit to the annual Festival of the Arts in downtown State College which I’ve been going to for the past, oh gosh, forty+ years? Wow, that’s crazy to think about.

In big news, I’m wrapping up the first draft of my second novel which feels equal parts amazing and terrifying. People have asked me, “are you going to publish these?” and yes, I’d love to, someday. But for now, I’m just trying to make them as good as I possibly can.

LATE SUMMER

Some of you might recognize this sailboat seen in the movie Wedding Crashers.

Annapolis had the cutest shops, like this vintage clothing store…

Almost 20 years since our first (blind) date

Our daughter Madison turned 30 years old this September and to celebrate, we took a family trip (including her husband Evan who I didn’t get any good pics of!) to Historic Annapolis for a few days and stayed on the water. It was so lovely! As we toured the centuries old streets and buildings, I couldn’t help but sing songs from my favorite musical.

AUTUMN

Looks like gingerbread but it’s really clay!

We’ve had a beautiful autumn so far. Sunshine and mild temperatures. Glorious! Now that it’s just a few short days until midterms, Jesse and I are trying to spend as much time as possible outdoors to mitigate the anxiety. We attended the annual pumpkin festival at the arboretum and for added whimsy I started making snowflake ornaments in the pottery studio to get a jump on Christmas. We did our early voting the other day and Jesse has been trained to be a poll worker. The vehicles above were spotted in the county parking lots and they made me smile. I thought some of you might get a kick out of them, too. We’re a blue dot surrounded by a sea of red here in central PA and sometimes it can feel very isolating–it’s nice to be reminded that we’re not alone in our anger towards this current, abhorrent regime.

THE ROSES…

Okay, it’s time to get into it. What’s going on with our rose collection? Why haven’t I been posting as many photos of them as I used to do?

The simplest answer? Climate change. Since my very first rose post fifteen years ago, I’ve seen huge changes in weather patterns with extremes on either end. For example, the winter of 25-26 brought us sustained cold that killed anything rated Zone 5-6 down to the roots. Plants that managed to survive the winter then came out of dormancy too soon when we had sustained, summer-like heat in April that woke everything up followed by a hard freeze that then killed all the buds. (Incidentally, many of our fruit farmers lost entire crops this year.) The early warm-up followed by late frost reduced the buds of my current favorite David Austin rose by half.

I grow mainly own-root roses and yes, many did re-grow but not fast enough in our short season to even flower, like Dark Desire, for example, which was very disappointing since I LOVE that rose and waited all year for those flowers to arrive. Summer comes earlier and earlier and this year it kicked the door in with excessive heat, record rain, and flooding. All this to say, these were not exactly the conditions to grow good roses. Over the past fifteen years, these extremes have become the norm, not the exception. (This year it was excessive rain, but before that it was drought.)

Rose midge continues to romp away in our garden, and after over ten years of this, I’ve given up the fight. (I talked a bit about that here.) No, I never did find a reliable way to manage the midge organically. Using beneficial nematodes did seem to knock the numbers down a little, but it requires consistency and treatments can be prohibitively expensive. It’s a pest issue that is pervasive in Centre County, PA.

I had such high hopes for our allotment garden as a place to plonk my roses down but it turned out to be too exposed and our roses are getting reduced by extreme conditions like sustained winds that whip across the open fields. (To give you an idea of how bad the winds are, Jesse and I tried to mitigate it by putting up a nylon mesh windbreak and the wind was so strong it actually snapped the steel t-posts in half and tore the fence down!)

Now for the good news and I hope what I’m sharing is helpful to some of you who are also struggling with your gardens in these challenging conditions. There ARE roses you can grow that will do well! Here’s my current plan:

Moving forward, I am only purchasing (own-root) roses that are hardy to zone 5 and below. Anything above that, which sadly does include many of the David Austin roses, are not tough enough for our conditions.
Hybrid rugosa roses are the way! I am always adding to my collection. The reasons for this are twofold: one, rugosas are incredibly hardy, as we all know, but two, they have a thicker peduncle which hinders the female rose midge from depositing her eggs on the buds. I rarely see damage from midge when it comes to rugosas.
Don’t sleep on Old Garden Roses like albas and damasks. They are typically resistant to rose midge. I say “typically” because in a cold climate, the midge emerges after they’ve flowered and the soil warms up.
I had lovely blooms from my damasks, albas, gallicas and ramblers, for example, even though they are surrounded by mature oaks. This is because many of them, such as Rosa alba suaveolens, are shade tolerant. Here’s a video of some of my favorite Old Garden Roses.