Gertrude's Flower Garden Weekly Diary

12/27/02 - Earlier this week, I was still raking and lugging leaves from the garden beds and lawns to the front curb where the borough plans to continue pick-ups until January third. Finally, however, I have all of the lawns and beds mostly free of leaves. There are still a few that I can clean up on nice days, but even if these have to wait until spring, no harm will be done. I also had someone clean my rain gutters around the house and the garage, and I cleaned out the window-wells where leaves love to congregate. The only clean-up job that I still haven't started is the removal of the leaves that have settled in the shrubs and particularly the azaleas, but this, again, is something that I can do to get outside during the winter when the weather cooperates. As I write this, I have just returned from visiting my Connecticut family for Christmas eve and day. We had a wonderful white Christmas with six to eight inches of wet snow that clung to the trees and bushes. Very beautiful, but when I got home this afternoon, I found the ground here with almost no snow, so that I had a white Christmas with none of the cleaning up to do!
I ran into a little bad luck with my early plantings of Begonias in the basement seedling garden. As you know, I am always careful to sterilize all of my planting containers to avoid "damp-off", which is a fugus (bacteria?) that destroys the seedlings shortly after they emerge. This year, I used planting mixture that was left over from last year and still in the mixing bucket. This mixture was perfectly all right last year, but evidently became infected since then, because many of my tiny Begonia plants that had begun to emerge from the soil have died off. I am not sure whether there will be enough left, but think that I will have to do some replanting after the holidays. I did move my seed containers off the warming pad, because the soil was drying out too quickly--I will see how things look after New Year, and decide then whether I need to replant some or all of my Begonias.
My Christmas picture this year is of the mantelpiece over the fireplace in the den, although I am going to take some pictures of the glass room decorated with lights and my little Alberta Spruce. I will show one of these pictures next week. I spend most of my leisure time in the den; the television is there, a desk, and chairs arranged for reading. The floors are random width oak and the walls random width knotty pine--over the years, the walls have turned a lovely honey color, and the floors have not darkened. The fireplace is stone with a mantelpiece that the builder hewed out of a railroad tie. Originally, I burned oak logs in the fireplace, but after fifty years of lugging logs in from the terrace on snowy nights and cleaning out ashes, we decided on a gas log that looks great and is warm and cozy. I cut holly from my neighbor's tree (no berries this year) and arranged the branches on the mantelpiece with some red cloth poinsettia flowers as highlights. The room is warm, cozy, and filled with the spirit of many Christmases.

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