Gertrude's Flower Garden Weekly Diary

12/8/00 - I have just finished watering the plants in the glass-room. Since this room is heated, and since the sun, when it is out, also warms the room, the soil in the pots dries out quickly. I have begun to add a small amount of fertilizer to my watering can, but experience has taught me not to over-fertilize the glass-room flowers, since over-watering results in lots of foliage but few flowers. The Christmas cacti, right on schedule, are all in various stages of blooming, the browallias get more flowers every time that I look at them, and the Pink Profusion zinnias are putting our auxiliary buds. Of course, the brightest colors are supplied by the geraniums, which seem to love it more inside than they do outside during the summer. The "crowd-pleasers," however, are the orange and lemon trees, which are the first thing that visitors notice.
All is well in the basement seed-garden. Both boxes of Wings begonias have fully germinated. I have removed them from their heating pad, and placed them under another florescent light. At one time I planned to have heating pads--rubber pads with electric wires embedded within them and wire frames above them to keep the tray of seedlings from direct contact with the pads--for all of my seedlings during their entire growth time. I soon found that, while heat is excellent for germination, once the seeds have germinated it is better to remove them from the heating pad. The heat dries the soil too rapidly, and requires you to be watering constantly; furthermore, the seedlings tend to grow tall and leggy. I water seedlings from the bottom by planting my seeds in a tray with holes in the bottom and putting that tray into another into which I can pour water, and by using a fine spray on the seedlings themselves. Besides the begonias, I have a tray of impatiens almost ready to move off the heating pad. I will plant another tray of impatiens tomorrow, and follow with white and yellow Star zinnias next week.
This week's picture is an autumn view of my sixty-three year old home. That's a cedar shingle roof that was replaced once during those years--I hope that I don't have to replace it again. As you can see, there were still some leaves on the trees when this photograph was taken, but they are almost bare now. As I may have mentioned before, Gertrude chose the design for our house from an architectual journal and had the builder modify it to suit her. After World War II, we put on an addition to accomodate our growing family rather than move to a larger home. I think that we have one of the more unique homes in our town. Sometime this winter, after a snowfall, I will take another picture of the house from this same angle.

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