Choice Morsels

Blackberries are on!  We're picking handfuls daily and have collected a pint already! So today's Garden Pic is a collage showing both blossom & berry: These are upright, thornless blackberries that range in height between 4 and 5 feet tall. (They have to be tied up) I fertilized them well last year, so the berries are big and fat this year. For best results, I dig in some granular garden fertilizer around the roots after fruiting is finished to nourish the new growth, then again in middle fall before it's cold. Today's Garden project was cleaning up the large back rain garden. It needed a bit of raking & weeding, a little thinning out of the Flag Iris and Liriope and the addition of some fresh river pebbles. *** Stop back tomorrow for Mama Kat to hear a good sleepwalking story!

Winter color in the garden is hard to come by, but here in the south we have one shrub that blooms between December & February, brightening landscapes with it's rose-like blossoms. Camellias. Thus their nickname: "Rose of Winter." Actually they can tolerate temps to minus 5 degrees and as hot as 100 degrees and there are 3000 varieties! I don't have any camellias actually in my yard, because the standard shrub needs yearly pruning back to keep in check, otherwise they can become huge and ungainly.  I often see camellia gone wild in abandoned landscapes. Last time I asked about dwarf varieties, the garden shop down the road was bleak on the topic.  But my neighbor has a pair of standard size red camellia shrubs on the border between our houses and I enjoy those. In fact, I take of pruning them into an upright tree-like shape, so they won't turn into 20 foot wide monstrosities draping into my landscape!   The people who originally built the hous...