Ice Cream for Hot Times

We haven't had much time for posting to our blog here with work at the nursery being so busy and then there are our two garden plots to plant and care for, but there has been a lot of growing going on all over. It has been a pretty cool spring here until this week and now the heat is on. It has been 100 + for a few days and looking like it might not cool down for a few more. Hopefully it will help the tomato plants to grow. The cold weather has got them just sitting there and not doing much, but with this heat they should be growing by leaps and bounds any day now.

At my plot there is a lot of flower activity going on and I managed to take a few pictures the other day. My favorite are the Ice cream Penstemons that I planted last year. There are some really fun varieties with names that make you salivate just thinking of them...Blueberry Fudge, Strawberries and Cream, Melting Candy and several more. They seem quite hardy here in my zone 9 garden and have doubled in size and number of blossoms.


We planted a few test roses at the garden last year also and they have started to bloom quite nicely. Two of the five we planted though are about to be yanked...they are full of rust and blackspot and they flowers never look nice. You can always put up with fungal things on leaves if the flowers are nice or at least smell good, but if the flower is no good out they go! It's okay we have some new roses to test this year that will take their place. The rose above is called Solstice and I am loving this rose. Michael is much harder to please than me when it comes to roses so the jury is still out as far as he is concerned, but he has no complaints about it yet and that's saying a lot!

Speaking of roses we got a new rose in our nursery this week that has turned out to be a huge hit somehow. It is called 'Legends', it is a rose put out by Weeks Roses in conjunction with Oprah Winfrey. I keep calling it "the Oprah rose". We sold 60 in a day and a half and had special orders for 60 more with in the week. We got an extra 60 in yesterday and sold about half of them today even though it was 100 degrees outside. I'm not so sure what is so special about this rose. My only observation was that the flower seems to get bigger and bigger after it opens. One flower I was observing was about 8" across. You can read all about the process of coming up with this rose at this site. It sure is a pretty rose though I am still not sure what all the hoopla is about, but maybe I should swoop one up while I can so I can say that I own a Legends rose...hmmmm...something to think about, but not for long...soon they will be all gone.

Hope all who read this post are finding ways to stay cool. Ice cream anyone?