Miracles of Water

Blooming beautifully in my garden today is Larry Grace's ANGELS GATHER AROUND.  This cultivar miraculously was internally timed to be unaffected by the shocks of a long, early spring with a hard freeze chaser in mid-April.

Angels have surely gathered around some of our new trees and shrubs, and they are all named "Treegator Junior."  We saw the "senior" style of Treegator around trees in Ohio two weeks ago during the AHS National Convention.  Didn't know the name of them, but looked up various watering devices in the online catalog of Hummert International and found them.

On Monday of last week I drove to Hummert's and bought two packs of ten at about $158 per pack.  If you buy them individually on Amazon, they run over $21 apiece.  The Junior version holds 15 gallons of water and releases it through two small valves on the under side over a period of five or six hours.  You fill each one with a garden hose.  Kathy set them around twenty shrubs that were in danger of being grown this year as "annuals," and she worked out a system to fill all of them within an hour.  That is quite a feat of planning.

All the green you see on Weigela "Wine and Roses" appeared on this shrub in the past few days, as did the flowers.  All the green on the Feathergill below appeared in the past few days.

This Tiger Eye Sumac has not looked this good since I planted it one sweaty day at the end of March.

Most in need of abundant water are our new River Birches.  Look at how the grass near the Treegators responded to all that water.

The surrounding front lawn as been baked hard.

After any normal rain, this cracked area is the bottom of a puddle.  The ground in front drains very poorly, and the low spots look like I should be raising water buffalo after a fall storm.

This greener part of the front lawn benefits from my sprinkler, which has been watering the daylily beds with regularity.  This morning in sub-90 temperatures I finished weeding, edging, and mulching this bed with a three-inch layer of leaf mold and a sprinkling of Preen to keep new weeds to a minimum.  I'd never used Preen before this year, and I don't imagine I'll ever garden without it, now that I've seen what a difference it makes.