May 5, 2000

With this wonderful, rainy spring, everything is looking absolutely terrific.  My side garden is coming along nicely.  I'm almost ready to start on the patio.  I planted some really lovely bushes and perennials in the beds around it.  Of course, with the rain, black spot is running rampant.  There is nothing that really works to completely rid roses of black spot except tearing them out and buying roses that are very resistant to it, but I'm  out there faithfully crawling about on the ground picking up dropped leaves, remulching around the roses and spraying them with a bioorganic spray that's supposed to prevent blackspot(It doesn't) and cure infected plants(doesn't do that either.)  Some of the worst roses are actually starting to look pretty good. 
I've been edging all the beds and doing a lot of general maintenance.  One thing I'm working on is retagging my plants.  I was using white tags and writing on them with permanent marker.  It looked like I had some kind of little graveyard all winter with all these little tags gleaming in the empty beds!!  So I'm turning to metal markers and engraving the plant information on the tags.  (Another problem was that after only a year, most the tags are fading.)  I started out making them, but decided to go with premade ones when I realized I'd need several hundred, but the disposable aluminum pans cut into strips and attached to heavy wire work really well and look very nice if you only want a few tags!!  And they're soft enough that they can be engraved just by writing with a ballpoint pen.

Variagated Weigela from Bluestone Perennials in its 2nd year.