Re: hellstrips
- Subject: Re: hellstrips
- From: E*@aol.com
- Date: Wed, 17 Apr 2002 23:00:11 EDT
In a message dated 4/17/02 9:54:21 PM Eastern Daylight Time,
corgilover@wi.rr.com writes:
<< after someone mentioned the snow piles. And after watching
my crocus' hurtle out of the ground, bloom, and die in the
space of the last three days, I'd choose something longer
lived. . . . >>
Me, too. Less than three days. I am rethinking the planting of early
blooming plants in zone 4. You see them such a short time. If bulbs you
lose most of them over the summer to rodents. Other little plants have fried
in the last two 90 degree days. Some years they ice up.
Perhaps we should spend the April days getting ready for the summer. There
is always the push to get an earlier flower, test the hardiness.
Because we did not have any below zero weather this year, one cold frame
apparently did not freeze past the shallow surface. There is not one plant
alive in that frame plus six troughs stored there, all devoid of plants save
one.
Gone are about two hundred pulsatilla plants which I finally learned how to
germinate. The frame is total network of underground passages of rodents.
Eryngium, a two year job with tap roots is also gone. A whole frame full of
plants. My mistake, I suppose, by closing it too soon last fall but I do not
think it ever froze down past one foot.
Two other frames were one OK and one some damages.
Just when you think you have mastered this weather in our northern states,
you haven't.
There is a Louise Beebe Wilder book on I think Pleasures of the Rock Garden
or a title almost like that. I have an original copy. In that book, the
gentle and exceptionally well informed Mrs. Wilder suggests one get a 22
caliber rifle and sit in the rocks and shoot the mice. Mrs. Wilder wrote
1930-1940. She must have been as angry as I am.
Claire Peplowski
NYS z4
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