Planting the First Roses of 2018

Golly, it seems a bit surreal to be sitting here telling you that we’ve already begun getting the new roses in the ground for this year. It’s barely March but my annual David Austin bareroot order arrived recently and it was all systems go at that point.

You might remember me sharing that on the other side of our courtyard garden, we have started creating generously sized “shrub borders.” Each one, on either side of the path, is about 22 feet deep at the widest point. {EDIT: I actually measured and discovered it wasn’t 12 feet as I had originally written but 22 feet at widest point, whoops!} If you’re new to my blog, you gotta go back to even just a year ago in the archives and see how different this yard looked. It boggles even my brain! In the photo below, you can clearly see where we stopped expansion because we have another fun project in the planning stage that might be in the way of the garden. More on that later, I hope!

We also had two very large poplar trees removed from this area a few weeks ago to allow for much more sunlight. You can see the stumps that still need to be ground down in the photo. Anyways, these larger borders are where I’d like to start growing some of my favorite OGR’s and species roses where they’ll have plenty of room to kick their feet up and get comfy. Look how empty these borders are! Lots of amending to do and then I can really start to fill them up with plants.

So what’d I order from David Austin? Félicité Parmentier, Queen of Denmark, Mme Hardy, Munstead Wood, Rosa Mundi. Readers who’ve been with me a while know we had these at the old garden but since we were only there for about 5 years, I don’t feel like I got to truly enjoy them. The Munstead Wood (below) went into a container. I wasn’t taking anymore chances after last summer’s vole debacle.

In other news, while recently we’ve had some very chilly, icy weather, it was quite warm here a few weeks ago and certain plants burst into bloom, like the bulbs, of course, but also our new Pluot tree. The fresh, white blossoms against the deep blue sky was a sight for these winter-sore eyes. I cannot wait for it to get bigger and really fill this somewhat dreary corner of the garden.

The chickens are doing well but they’ve been getting harassed by a couple of hawks that have zeroed in on our garden and that of our neighbor’s. One of his chickens was actually caught by these hawks not too long ago. It’s very scary and very sad but we’re doing the best we can to keep them safe and sound. On that note, we decided not to add any more pullets this spring until things feel safer.

The beehives have been set up to house new bees that are arriving next month. Our two colonies collapsed last autumn due to varroa. This is entirely my fault and I’ve been feeling so much heartache and frustration against myself and my own inexperience. I debated just setting out empty, comb-filled hives to simply try and attract a swarm or two but we found some bees from a treatment-free apiary so we decided to give them a go (as well as setting out bait hives for swarms.) I’ll talk more about the changes I’ve made to the hives and my plans for soft treatments to combat varroa as we get further into summer.

If you’d like to start following Hedgerow Rose on Instagram, I’ve decided to start a video series-which I hope to do weekly-talking more in depth of some of my favorite roses. The nice thing about video is that you can really get so much more visual information than in still photos, which I find helpful when selecting roses. These will be on my stories, so once they’re up they’ll only be available for 24 hours. Day 1 of the series was me talking about Tuscany Superb. Hope you liked it!

Have a wonderful weekend, everyone!