A little light gardening...
Jul. 9th, 2022 03:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
which_chickOnce upon a time, long ago, I bought a rosebush: Ispahan. The internet said that this was a rose that would get quite large. I am not sure why I thought that meant it would fit in a 4'x4' space. Anyway, the BASE of it fits in a 4x4 space... but it grows long whippy canes (like 15 feet long) that arch and snag people mowing the grass a LEGIT DECENT DISTANCE AWAY.
Ispahan is a great rosebush. Healthy, smells great, blooms for like a whole month, does not need any special attention over the winter, etc. It's just... huge and honestly huger than it should be for its location in my yard.
My flipping snowball bush was AMAZING and wonderful. It looked like this:
But, it didn't leaf out this spring and the bark started coming off in huge sheets, so... I cut it down and burned it. :( All dead, all gone. With the snowball bush gone, I had a vacant sunny spot in the yard.
So, I contacted my welder and commissioned a rebar support structure for Ispahan. I picked up the rebar support structure this morning, and it is awesome just like I wanted. Yay custom-welded structure! (You could call it a "trellis" but it is basically not anywhere near cute or decorative. It is structural. The store varieties of trellis are not sufficient to support an Ispahan.)
Here's what I started with:
I dug a circle around him, shovel deep, and then trussed him up and used my bucket loader with chains and bucket hooks to pull him carefully out of the ground.
And then I moved him to a new location, where I'd dug a nice-sized hole. I moved a lot of Ispahan's dirt from the old hole to the new hole because it was better dirt. I also installed his new support structure to help hold him up. Oh, and I pruned him back pretty hard to reduce the leaf area he has to support with shocked roots. (It's misty and cool today, which also helps.)
I filled in the hole, filled in the OLD hole, and took some pictures. I still gotta get him some horse poop mulch but that'll be in a few weeks once I'm sure he's not dead.
The support structure is two half-pipe shapes that are held together with pipe clamps so that they can be taken apart and removed from around the shrubbery for pruning and stuff.
Anyway, I'm about done with yard work for today. It was a pretty good-sized project.
I know that rose transplanting should ideally be done when the roses are dormant but sometimes you just gotta do what you just gotta do. Cutting them back a lot and watering them religiously can help with survival, so I'm going that direction with this. We'll see how it goes.
Ispahan is a great rosebush. Healthy, smells great, blooms for like a whole month, does not need any special attention over the winter, etc. It's just... huge and honestly huger than it should be for its location in my yard.
My flipping snowball bush was AMAZING and wonderful. It looked like this:
But, it didn't leaf out this spring and the bark started coming off in huge sheets, so... I cut it down and burned it. :( All dead, all gone. With the snowball bush gone, I had a vacant sunny spot in the yard.
So, I contacted my welder and commissioned a rebar support structure for Ispahan. I picked up the rebar support structure this morning, and it is awesome just like I wanted. Yay custom-welded structure! (You could call it a "trellis" but it is basically not anywhere near cute or decorative. It is structural. The store varieties of trellis are not sufficient to support an Ispahan.)
Here's what I started with:
I dug a circle around him, shovel deep, and then trussed him up and used my bucket loader with chains and bucket hooks to pull him carefully out of the ground.
And then I moved him to a new location, where I'd dug a nice-sized hole. I moved a lot of Ispahan's dirt from the old hole to the new hole because it was better dirt. I also installed his new support structure to help hold him up. Oh, and I pruned him back pretty hard to reduce the leaf area he has to support with shocked roots. (It's misty and cool today, which also helps.)
I filled in the hole, filled in the OLD hole, and took some pictures. I still gotta get him some horse poop mulch but that'll be in a few weeks once I'm sure he's not dead.
The support structure is two half-pipe shapes that are held together with pipe clamps so that they can be taken apart and removed from around the shrubbery for pruning and stuff.
Anyway, I'm about done with yard work for today. It was a pretty good-sized project.
I know that rose transplanting should ideally be done when the roses are dormant but sometimes you just gotta do what you just gotta do. Cutting them back a lot and watering them religiously can help with survival, so I'm going that direction with this. We'll see how it goes.
