Garden

[Kachina624]

@kathya1119  The trouble is, this year the date of the last freeze is a ******-shoot, who knows?  It's usually about April 18th, but we've had 80° the past week.  Cooler next week but not by much, maybe 10°.  They were all growing out so I went ahead and pruned but did not fertilize. 

[kathya1119]

@Kachina624, this weather has been insane. My roses never stopped blooming all winter. Pope John Paul, Kordes Perfecta, and Gemini especially kept pumping out blooms from last spring until the freeze we just had. Now this week, we're going to be close to 90 -- which I wouldn't bund, but the pool is too cold to use yet. At least I'm getting some sun as I start getting my plants organized and the planting beds ready. I need to move a couple of azaleas behind the pool cage fto a different location in that bed so I can put in the hardy hydrangeas  that I bought from Cottage Farms; I also have two of my own to transplant (tricolored leaves -- they barely bloom, but with those leaves, they don't need to!). They were underneath a water oak we had removed ten days ago. It was on its last legs and too close to the house for comfort in case of a tropical storm or hurricane. It was losing branches with every thunderstorm, and it had to go.

I still can't get over how large the side yard looks with it gone (and we have over an acre, which is huge to the 5000 sq ft we had back in Jersey -- and that included the house and driveway. And that was considered an oversisized lot in our town). We had the grandaddy live oak at the back of the yard trimmed and thinned out, and we had the parts of the neighbor's live oak that hang over our property cut back, too -- it was a home for spiders, (BIG spiders) and neigher one of us liked running into those webs when we rode past on the mowers (we have nis and hers mowers -- I took the John Deere when the DH got a zero-turn, which is a necessity with the young trees he put into the front yard. The JD is one of their lower-end models and the turning radius isn't tight enough to get around those trees. So I cut the relatively unobstructed yard behind the house, and he cuts the front and sides. Frankly, I think he put too many in, but hey.