A wise man—our lovely and talented Webmaster—told me when I started this blog venture that nothing kills traffic faster than failing to update regularly. Then your readers assume you’re off doing something else. Well, I was.

Since my last post, we’ve been dealing with lots of things that have nothing to do with gardening. A serious health scare for my sister (she’s fine now, but it was terrifying for a while), a trip out of town to see her, a car purchase, startling developments at work, and a couple of pesky household problems involving trees and water damage to the master bedroom. I’ve been a wee bit, how you say, distracted.

But we’re back now, and I hereby resolve to do better by all six of my readers. If there are six of you left.

Today’s garden photo: Further evidence that this growing season will defy all attempts at prognostication. I planted a climbing rose a couple of years ago and stuck a bit of old storm-door trim behind it in hopes it would climb through it. Climb it has, but the plant has never bloomed.

Imagine my surprise when I spotted this bud a few days ago. The deer have helped themselves to every rose I’ve planted (the others are all dead; thank you, Bambi!), so I didn’t have much hope for this one, either. But the three spireas around it are growing like weeds this year, so they may be making it a little more difficult for the deer to wade in and chomp. The spireas will need to be cut back eventually; I know precious little about roses, but they’re supposed to have good air circulation, and the spireas are definitely crowding this plant. But that will have to wait. The spireas are blooming madly themselves, and since the planets have aligned, inexplicably, to produce this single rosebud, I’m not mucking with the works until it flowers and fades.

Posted on Saturday, June 19th, 2010 at 6:48 pm. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.