Current Events at the Heritage Rose Garden

Curator's Report, September, 2014

Drought and Gophers

This has been an especially bad year for the garden. Usually, we get enough rain in the winter to soak the entire garden, and clear our any heavy metal and salt accumulation due to the recycled water that irrigates the roses during the dry months. Last winter we didn't get that good soaking. We can only hope for more rain storms this winter- a good heavy soaking would do wonders. Fortunately, there have been recent upgrades in the recycled water, and we hope for improvement in the condition of the roses, and fewer weeds, which had gotten out of hand with the high nitrogen levels in recycled water in past years.

Because of the drought, many roses that were doing OK have died.

The other problem this year is gophers. They have been a problem for years. About 7 years ago we started planting all new roses in gopher baskets, because the gophers were attacking the roots of newly planted roses. Now, there are no young succulent roots available to the gophers, and they are attacking the older established roses. Recently we have seen dead roses that were recently healthy, good sized bushes. A quick pull, and they come out of the ground, completely rootless. It's no easy task to kill large numbers of gophers. Poison is out of the question in a garden used constantly by people walking dogs, and by wildlife when people aren't around. Traps can't be used for the same reasons. Gassing has been proposed, and we wish they'd hurry up and do it. And they'll need to make many repeat visits to have an impact so I hope they are planning to do that.

rootless

Autumn in the Heritage Rose Garden Event

We hope to have another successful event on September 27. There are about 100 roses for sale this year. Details are on this page: heritageroses.us/FallEvent.htm. You can see pictures and videos from the first event here: Photos and Videos from Oct 2, 2010.

 

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Link to past status pages:

News Archive

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Address comments to Jill Perry

 

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