This is where you will find my many gardening blunders, oversights, and honestly, sometimes, just down right gardening neglect. It’s definitely not that I intend to, but hey, lets face it, life happens, we get busy, unexpected things come up, maybe we get sick or develop a health issue, whatever causes it, it happens! Boom! One day out of the blue, what seems like all of a sudden, but probably wasn’t, there is a problem in the garden, yard, tree, or for me, most often it’s with a flower pot or a rose. Garden maintenance is time consuming, lots of work, and usually only truly satisfying and appreciated by the one doing it. I don’t, by any means, have a show stopper, manicured lawn but, we do our best with the time we are able to spend on it. Having said that, anyone who loves to garden understands the time put in is well worth the reward, but then there are these moments, these unintentional mishaps, that might make one wonder if it’s worth it. The answer is still yes, yes it is. If at first you don’t succeed, try, and try again! We’ve all heard it and it’s very true for gardening, so on this page I will try to share, not only, my own blunders here, but also any that I learn about and hopefully you will share some with us too! Gardening is a lot of learning what you like and don’t like but a lot more of learning what your yard likes and doesn’t like, however, sometimes we are able to persuade our yard to like something we like, if we put in a little research to see what it needs, that it’s not getting. (All of a sudden, I feel like I’m talking about marriage, nope, still on the gardening page, lol, after 33 years of marriage I think we’re both getting each other figured out, with a little “persuasion” from both sides.) Some gardeners spend time every day gardening, or every weekend, or maybe just a few days out of the month, or only one day in the spring and their done. I, on the other hand, am a little of each of these! I have no routine to speak of, other than to enjoy it daily, do a few small chores on it weekly, do any major projects on the weekends, and I have a few spring days when I do quite a bit of cleaning and planting annuals and then wrap it up with a lot of prayer that I can keep up with it all! Best of wishes for all of your gardening endeavors, no matter what kind of gardener you are, there is always some satisfaction in getting out and giving it a try!
Oversight-
I Can’t Believe I Didn’t Notice!
My husband and I were working on the yard when he asked me why the bark on our crepe myrtle was so dark, I looked at both of them and said, “I don’t know, maybe it’s a different species?” He said, “Uh, unless there is a species with white spots on black bark, I don’t think so.” So I grab my phone and start googling and apparently, crepe myrtles can get black sooty mold, ugh! I researched different treatments but started with the simplest one. I took dish soap, a store brand that looked like Dawn, and put some in a five gallon bucket with water and got a scrub brush after it. It, immediately, washes right off. I, however, couldn’t reach the top branches so I did the best I could and used Rose Shield on it which is a pesticide and disease treatment. I am going to let it go through it’s season of blooming and then get help to clean tops of branches and probably cut it shorter where I can’t clean it off. This has been my latest oversight so I’ll let you know how it’s going. This is the before and after pictures I took after using the dish soap. There are other things online that it says you can do, but I started with what I had on hand. If you have had to do this, let me know what you did. Neem oil will be my next course of action. I will share more pics soon, I just can’t believe when I trimmed the branches in early Spring that I didn’t notice it!