❤ plant own-root roses so they won't be overtaken by Dr. Huey rootstock :)

That's a busy to-do list. Good luck and have fun!

Nothing to-do here except look at the gray skies and wait for spring.

Like seil, I have nothing much to do here, but stare at the surrounding white, and freeze to death. Spring is not even on my radar right now. Diane

I still need to prune most of my medium sized roses (I let the giant ones do what they want..), feed them, and of course plant several which are now in pots. This is sort of a second Spring in this climate - the rains have come on well (18 inches in the last 3 months) after our long summer drought. The Japanese quince is starting to bloom, as is the banksia. Next will be the ornamental crab apple, and the plum trees. My bulbs have been coming up already for 3 weeks - nice surprises every time I go outside.

Jackie

In SoCal, our winter came and is over:

It was on December 25th:

• High 54°F
• Low 34°F

As Seil stated nothing to do except wait for Spring...I should move to a warmer client..this weather can be depressing

Rosecrazy....a warmer client? I hope that was a typo--ha. Happy New Year, and we in the north will need one. Diane

A warm client sounds more fun than a warm climate.

18 inches of rain Jackie? Wow!!! We were going to have a rare, big freeze in my part of the bay area this upcoming week... but now that changed and we have 10 days of rain planned instead and no freeze! YES! But...That changed the to do list quite a bit. With the rain coming I have a big to do list today and tomorrow.

- Get all the seeds in.

- Harvest most the lettuce and swap it for broccoli, radishes and carrots for a couple months.

- Try to get everything that's new out of their pots and planted in the ground.

- Root 60 cuttings of Fortuniana for rootstock... Although I actually checked that one off my list yesterday. :)

- Prune everything that needs it.

- Fertilize all the azaleas and the established roses.

Yikes that's a lot!

I hope some of this rain makes it's way to SoCal too!!!

It's supposed to rain Thursday through Tuesday. It feels like it's been decades since it rained that much in So Cal.

I need to add, "strip all roses of chili thrip-damaged leaves" to my To Do List.

Jasmine you get thrips in your area? Oh no!!!! They will be here soon then. I'm lucky they're not here already.

I finished everything. Pretty much. I drank champagne (I mean orange juice... er... mimosas) for New Years this morning and got it all done. Whether it was done right or not... well... it's my yard and no one else is grading me so it's good enough. Realization: Champagne helps heavy handed pruning. Less thinking. Just my 2 tipsy cents. ;)

As far as the seeds... well... we will see. Champagne may not have helped those little guys.

Made it more fun tho. ;)

Happy New Years everyone! Hope your 2017 is fruitful, abundant, and amazing. :)

Cori Ann, the chili thrips arrived not last fall, but the fall before. I was hoping winter would killed them for good, because we had a nice spring. But they came back with the autumn winds. They are awful. Baldo Villegas, an entomologist will speak at the Santa Clarita Rose Society meeting on March 12th. I hope he has some suggestions about what to do about these guys.

Not much. Just build a planter bed and add soil and amendment to another raised bed. I better get with it before my orders start arriving.

I have until March to take care of everything. BUT, I need it to be finished. First up is digging the area out for my 2 Blueberry bush's I got from K&M last spring. They have been in 3 gal. pots since I received them in 1 gal. pots. They will be going into well prepared soil, so they should be in good shape. Then comes the roses. 4 roses need to be moved to a new home. Then I need to dig out 2 new area's for roses that have been in pots since last year. Then the 1st week of March I will be taking all the mulch and leafs out of all the beds and clean up all the beds real good. Then throw down a couple of shovels of Black Cow around each bush and spread it around a little. Then shred up all the old mulch and leafs and spread it around in the beds. Scatter hands full of Milorganite all through the beds then put out the pine needles on top of everything. Water everything down real well and hopefully start my pruning by mid March. In between everything I need to add some more landscape timbers where I am now using 4x4's. Who knows, I might find something else to do while I'm at it. I just hope my shoulders hold up another year.

I can see I better get cracking! Children still here, but after quite a bit to do. Sounds like Cori Ann should whip this place into shape now that she's done, and I can start the champagne.

Lol. The champagne was great... the thing is I am not quite sure I actually remember where I put all the seeds. It will be a surprise in spring. :)

I am designing bed board garden benches! :-)

I have a long list - all of the roses need pruning, or at least tidying, feeding, etc. The problem is that, since I posted above, we have had ANOTHER 10 inches of rain in about the past week - no kidding - 4 big storms in a row. There is blue sky for the first time this morning, but there are storm clouds on the horizon. Hoping to get in a bike ride with my DH before it starts raining again. The bike path we normally use, however, is part of a creek system which may flood, and the little town (San Anselmo) it goes through was evacuated last night in fear of flooding (you can hear the flood sirens from our house - they use the old air raid system), so we may have to find somewhere else to go for a ride. NOT COMPLAINING! After a 5 year drought I am never going to complain about rain, ever.

Jackie

Walking outside this morning since it's not raining in my area of NorCal today and noticed clumps of germinated seeds coming up. Lol! Seems as though, with the champagne, towards the end I just threw handfuls into the soil and didn't even try to spread them around. Ummmmm.... Cori Ann what were you doing??? LOL! At least the clumps are kind of in the right spots.... !

Jackie I have some friends in San Anselmo that had to evacuate last night. Scary! It is crazy that here, just an hour or two away, we have only gotten about 1-1.5 inches a day during the rain. We are supposed to have a reprieve from the rain here until next week... I hope you get a few sunshine hours too!

Thanks - it did clear up yesterday morning for long enough for us to get our bike ride in, but another storm came in last night, and it is raining steadily right now. Supposed to be clear for the weekend. We shall see.

I saw one of those official but temporary yellow sandwich signs the cities put out on streets yesterday in San Anselmo. Have never seen one before. It said: "IF FLOODED, TURN AROUND - DON'T DROWN".

Jackie

You might consider a horticultural oil spray after pruning. That has made a difference for my roses to start off bug and mildew free.

I think I better prune more now that I know we're not supposed to prune except in January here. And I'm adding horticultural oil to the to do list. First time ever using a pressurized sprayer. Hopefully it's not like a Lucille Ball episode.

Today, I completed all of the stuff on my "Fast approaching To-Do list".

I will apply horticultural oil spray.

Also, I noticed dusty orange spores on the underside of the leaves.

In May 2015, I bought 70 bags of bark mulch and applied a 4-inch-deep layer on top of my garden's soil. Since then, zero weeds had emerged!

While working in my garden today, I noticed that almost all the bark mulch had decomposed so it's time for more mulch!

Great job Gary! I do about 4-6 inches of mulch every year or two as well. Works awesome. The only spot where I usually need to weed is in the areas where there are riverrocks instead of bark mulch. I love my dry creek bed and riverrocks, but they are a pain to weed compared to the easy bark mulch.

In SoCal today (Monday), it was a bright, clear and warm (70°F), breezy day!
Lots of garden work done.

Next time you renew your mulch you might find that it's less expensive to have a truckload of mulch delivered instead of bags.

Bags are easier to move around though.

Of the 18 roses "too close together" last year, only 11 are still living. Today, I dug up:

• 4 dead roses
• 3 roses that had been overtaken by the Dr. Huey rootstock

The remaining 11 roses are now far apart.

I contacted my city's Public Works Department. They have FREE recycled green waste but they couldn't vouch for the quality of the ingredients.

I live in a condo so I can't have a truckload of mulch delivered to my garden. It would have to be dumped in a driveway 200 feet away then I'd have to transport it to my garden. Bagged mulch -- although more expensive than bulk mulch -- is much easier to handle.

I have a child's "Radio Flyer 'All-Terrain Cargo Wagon'" which will carry 4 bags of mulch per trip from the driveway to my garden. Semi-easy-peasy.

Radio Flyer Hot Rod Wagon

So....... um......

its been 3-4 weeks and all my seeds are germinating. You can see the lovely little sweet peas here... this was before the champagne. Or at least at the beginning of the champagne.

And this is where my seeds ended up after about 2 bottles of champagne. Don't judge me. Remember? It was New Years.

So, ummmm. Yeah. It seems I was drunk and just dropping handfuls of seeds.

I guess now.... let's see what happens! :)

Hope you're all doing well on your "to-do" lists!

Lol, check the other side of fence- your neighbor's yard, you might see more there.......