Gertrude's Flower Garden Weekly Diary

1/11/02 - This morning (Wednesday) I watered all of the plants in the glass room, glass window, and around the house. The Christmas cacti are still the most colorful of the glass room flowers followed by the bright red geraniums. Some blue is supplied by the browallia and lobelia, and a few pink blooms are on the hanging geraniums. And the colorful fruit on the orange and the lemon trees provides bright spots of color. I recently put all of the plants one by one on the kitchen table, trimmed and clutivated them before giving each a watering with a weak solution of soluable fertilizer and returning them to their places--the begonias haven't all gotten back the blooms that I removed to keep them from getting too leggy.
Things are going well in the basement seed garden. Besides the begonias, which will take many weeks to grow to the size when I can transplant them, and the Star zinnias, which are almost ready to transplant, the Dahlberg daisies are also off their warming pad. Still on warming pads are impatiens, petunias, dwarf ageratum, Periwinkle vinca, browallia, and heliotrope. All of these have begun to germinate, and I have removed the plastic covers that I keep on until I see the seedlings coming up, but I don't like to remove them from their warm environment until I am sure that all of the seeds have germinated. I have a lot more seeds to plant (too many?), and I am anxious to get started with the transplanting, but only the Star zinnias are close to being large enough to transplant.
We were expecting some snow this week, but it didn't reach us in South Jersey--only rain which we are grateful for, since we are still well below normal rainfall. Instead of the planned picture of the old homestead and front garden sonw-covered, therefore, the one below is a winter view of the house and front garden. The narrow beds by the driveway, the curbside beds, and the circle and entrance way beds are all bare and waiting for the first peeps of early bulbs sometime in the next six weeks or so. (I'm sure there will be a snow picture by then). I planted last Christmas's little Alberta spruce trees in the corners on either side of the front steps, and the one from the previous year in front of the right side bed--this year's tree is in the glass room waiting for spring. Except for minor additions such as the spruce trees and some azaleas, the other plantings are the originals made over sixty years ago. I try to keep all of the shrubbery trimmed so that it does not hide the house and particularly the windows. This is fairly easy to do with the two yews on either side of the walkway, but the two larger specimens to the left need plenty of trimming each year. I believe that carefully trimmed shrubbery adds greatly to the overall appearance of your house and garden.

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