It has been a while since our last post. Wow, have we been busy!! My other company Catalonia Studio had some customers that needed work done and so I have had to stay on top of fulfilling their needs. Further, we had to prep our roses for the 2023, 70th anniversary, rose show for the the Fort Vancouver Rose Society. What an experience that was! As much as I prepared to display our roses at the rose show, we were SO UNPREPARED. I volunteered to clerk for the judges and I was taken back by what the judges look for when determining the winners of each category. I am glad that it was a bit of a slow year as many from the area decided to go up to Tacoma for their rose show. This allowed me to enter my deeply flawed roses for competition. I say deeply flawed with a heavy heart. We put a lot of time and effort into maintaining our roses for competition this year, but we had a last minute rainfall about a week before the rose show. This caused almost all of my white and pink roses to exhibit botrytis blight. about a week before the rains, my wife joked that we should buy umbrellas for our roses. I thought they would be fine. They were not and I should have taken her joke seriously.
That said, there is a bright side to all of this. I believe we won in a category for our displayed roses. Hoorah! Further, I got to learn a great deal about what the entry and judging process is like. I hope that our baby roses will be entered next year for competition. Speaking of our baby roses, we have culled a great many and dwindled our stock from 278 down to 65 roses. Wow, we sought to choose the nicest blooms and those that exhibited little disease. We are hoping that from these 65, we can pare the number down further to just 25 roses by the end of this year. The culling process has begin and we are excited to see which roses perform the best. Cheers to all!