Thank you to all the good people who attended my Courageous Pruning Seminar on Saturday. I enjoyed out time together and I hope you found the information encouraging and empowering.
I’m going out this morning (Monday) to apply the first round of Systemic Rose Care granules to my shrub roses. This is a great product that not only feeds the roses, but also protects them from sucking and chewing insects.
Applications are repeated at six-week intervals, so that means three or four applications for the growing season depending on when you start.
Those aphids and pesky little green worms that defoliate a shrub rose in just a couple of days are completely eliminated with this product, meaning that you don’t have to try standing on your head to get a liquid spray under the leaves where the critters are feasting. In addition, the roses get the correct nutrients for healthy growth and lots of flowers.
In recent posts I’ve been talking about some of my favorite annual flowering plants, and today I want to introduce gomphrena and vinca.
All around purple is my favorite gomphrena, but its colors include lavender, white, and orangey red as well as the purple. The flowers resemble clover blooms. They are round, ball-shaped and have a papery feel and dry true to color. This plant grows to 18 inches tall and has amazing flower power.
Gomphrena demands full and even hot sun and prefers a soil that dries well between waterings. It will rot off if the soil stays too wet. That factor makes this a tricky plant to use in planters, but its use in ground beds is fabulous!
The Cora series of flowering vinca is another plant that I use every year. This plant works beautifully in planters, window boxes or in ground beds. It grows in a mounded form and is very well mannered, never infringing on its neighbors.
Vinca will grow in light shade or full sun. It is self-cleaning, so deadheading is a chore you can eliminate.
My favorite color is coral with a red eye, but it comes in shades of red, pink, white, and salmon.
This is another plant that doesn’t appreciate soil that stays wet for an extended time. Don’t confuse this flowering vinca with the green or variegated vining type of vinca.