Kim, I have truck loads of well composted oak leaves...lol I am just happy to know I can dump some on the roses! We have blueberries growing here too, top dressing with an acid mulch is going to be rather common. I hear coffee grounds work well. Because of the soil in this bed, I plan on doing a lot of digging. I have shovel dug and amended at least 1/4 acre in the past years, is does get easier! Even if I am getting older. Jeri, There are several roses in the Sac Catalog that I would love to have, hopefully next year they will have some interesting or similar roses and Mom will be up for the drive. I am hoping once she can see better, I can take her to Descanso and Huntington. I would love to sign up for the San Juan Bautista tour, but no idea how things will go so better not sign up for anything. Besides, I have a bunch of new garden books to read while sitting with mom in the yard. Rosefolly, It is an old house, I think it was the caretakers house to the large mansion that used to be next door. We think the house was built about 1890 in a sort of Queen Anne Cheap style, the mansion not so cheap. It might have been deep gray, white and pink trim as we found evidence of those colors. As a kid, the mansion had fallen in disrepair and was a giant hippy house. By the end of the 70's, hippies in SB was not a popular thing, and there was no effort to save the mansion from the bulldozers. Today, it would have been a precious historical building instead of a bunch of over watered non descript townhouses. Progress.

Sassy... since you haven't used it, it may help to know how it works. Preen is a pre-emergent... it tell seeds not to germinate. It is pretty effective. We have more garden than we can really take care of, particularly as we spend a lot of time in spring getting ready for our annual sale and can't stay on top of all the weeding. I am careful using it around youngish plants... it is not supposed to affect growing plants, but some have noted a tendency for it to retard the growth of a young plant. it will also keep your hosta seeds from germinating - it wasn't until we didn't get around to using it for a couple of years that I realized just how easily hostas reseed. I'm told that weed seeds will pile up and when you quit using the Preen, you will have a big weed bloom. Don't know if this is true. We've had good luck combining the Preen with Pine Bark Nugget mulch. We lay down newspaper, then mulch... and then toss Preen into the mulch to retard the growth of the weed seeds that fall into the spaces in the mulch.

I looked back into my log records and found that trialed the "Rose" variety in 2001,; I was growing for restaurants at the time. My records indicate I got the seed in a trade from SE PA (indeed, that is Amish country). Some of my end of year ratings were as follows: Folliage desease tolerance/resistance 2.3 on a scale topped at 3.0. (Rutgers rated a 2.0) Size typically 3.5 to 4.5 OD X 2.0 to 2.5 deep. Yield 70% to sales, 20% to sauce or juice. Comments--Shows promise, very good tasting attractive fruits. So, I saved seed and then somehow forgot all about the variety. We were involved at the time in negotiations to sell our orchard and home to a developer, and 2001 was not one of my better managed years! Seeds now out of inventory and on deck for a 2010 growout!

Thank you! No, you don't really "sell cuttings", but there is always hope someone who is already set up with the appropriate licenses might want to introduce and sell a promising seedling. "Tiny" isn't as much of an inhibition to raising seedlings as you might presume. Fortunately, most aren't worth retaining, so while you may germinate hundreds, it's fairly easy to cull that number down to a few dozen, or less. Plus, it is exciting and FUN, especially for someone who finds genetics fascinating. Unless you spend several full time schedules at work, "retirement" isn't really necessary to be able to breed plants and raise seedlings. You can begin as easily as simply collecting the seeds from self set hips from the roses in your garden, planted in a flower pot, or go "larger" by building tables or planters similar to what I have posted on my blog, here. Planting seed and raising seedlings honestly isn't difficult, nor does it require huge investments of money, time or room. You control all of those variables, so you can practice while you are still chained to other pursuits, and decide if and when you want to make it more "involved". I was more than a little "obsessive" in generating crosses this year and will definitely have more seeds to plant than I can handle. I think the spread sheet showed somewhere around 415 different crosses I've already collected and bagged seed from...so far, and there are ONLY around a hundred more tagged crosses out back ripening, so that number could swell very easily. If you would like to play, practice, it would be easy, and my pleasure, to supply you with some seeds to experiment with. If you're interested, you can either private message me here, or use my screen name here to send an email through the long-hated (for good reason) America on Line. Kim Rupert is on Help Me Find, so there are better photos of the flowers than I can take while my plant remains in its pot. "I" hate to be potted! In any sense of the terms. Mr. Moore used to sell the seedlings which weren't exactly what he'd imagined in his mind's eye for $2 at the nursery. Paul Barden bought this one because the breeding intrigued him. The plant is one which doesn't show its mettle confined in a pot. Once Paul grew it out and saw what it could do, he contacted Mr. Moore and offered him the rose because he felt it should be introduced. They initially offered it to Sean McCann, but Sean wanted an exhibition HT to bear his name. Paul called me one night with the offer to name it for me because of my fascination with Mr. Moore's stripes and mosses. The rest is history!