Happenings at The Windy Knoll

 

We butchered Penny  Mac yesterday and it was not before she needed it.  The Penny Mac Hydrangea was so overgrown we could hardly get between her and the Japanese Red Maple and this is our path to the rooting bed.  Our job was not professional by any means, but we did get the shrub cut back a bit.  The DeKalb County Master Gardeners will have a plant sale next April and asked us to put some cuttings in the bed for them.  Cuttings they have — we put 63 Penny Macs in.  Sure hope they’ll have lots of need for that one.  Not only that, but we already had that many cuttings of various other kinds in another rooting bed.

John did the heavy work and, sitting on my walker, I cut the pieces down to size making cuttings.  When all that was finished, I dipped the cuttings in water and then in rooting hormone — all John had to do at the rooting bed was make a little hole and insert the cutting.  You probably already know that some of this Country Living writing is repetitive — but remember John uses Oil Dry for the rooting medium and uses Gold Bond Foot Powder for the rooting hormone.  He has excellent luck and has been accused of rooting broom handles.

The Dog Hobble (Leucothoe) stands right next to the Penny Mac and was as overgrown as the hydrangea, so  it got pruned, too.  Whew — quite a job for two old codgers.

While we were in the area we tried to weed a little bed of Southern Maidenhair Fern that has been absolutely been taken over by Bermuda grass.  Earlier this spring, John dug it all up and tried to separate the special fern from the pesky grass.  The fern is trying to survive, but it’s a chore.  It does best growing near limestone and thus it sets in a shady (most of the time) bed by the underpinning of the house.  My daddy used to say if you dug Bermuda grass and burned it — the ashes would sprout.  It’s tough to get rid of — impossible for us — it has ruined my beautiful herb bed that I nursed along for all those years.

The Salvia Gauranetica, out near the sun porch, had already been cut back about halfway and it really looks bedraggled and poorly at this point.  However, it will put out new grown and by September it should have lots of new blooms for the Hummingbirds to get the nectar in preparation for their flight south.

The chores around this farm are endless, but it’s just all a part of country living.