Our local rose society (Fort Vancouver Rose Society) put on a spring clean-up for the rose gardens they tend to. Our area was at one time a swamp. Today, it is developed, but the thick clay soil remains. During the rainy season, the soil hardly drains and when you walk on the ground the muck sticks to your shoes. In the summer, that clay turns to concrete and doing any sort of extensive yard-work becomes all the more difficult. When the Rose Society said they would be doing a clean-up, I thought what better signal than that to begin the clean-up and expansion of our garden too.
We planted twenty-one new roses and spread compost and three-way soil around our yard. We also repotted thirty-seven of our roses that reside in plastic containers. The previous soil we were using just held too much moisture and caused root rot of our roses. We are ecstatic to see the results. If all turns out well, we will likely add another twenty roses to our yard. This will bring the grand total of rose plants in our yard to one hundred sixty-eight!! Keep your fingers crossed!
Update to our rose sprouts:
We now have forty-two sprouts that are thriving in our green house. This number includes a reduction in some of the ones previously reported. We had a number die off due to the high level of humidity in our green house we experienced in the strong rains we experienced last week. In my humble opinion, this is okay. We live in a very wet area and we want our rose plants to be able to thrive in humid/damp/moist environments. Thus, even though the loss of the seedlings saddens us greatly, we know that we will be all the better for it.