I am not sure I understand what does it mean "didnt cut anything that didn't have a tip at the end of its growth" :) Anyway, Celestial can handle a lot of winter prunning and still bloom well. It actually loves it. I tried not to prune and had less blooms. So there should be someother reason for non blooming. My Celestial is from Pickering too. It is in a spot that is sunny in winter, but quite shady in summer when trees get leaves. I think i had much less blooms first 2-3 years. Could it be that it just need more time? How big it is now? Olga

I find my DDs lose color in heat and get it back in cooler weather. Hot temps and lots of sun seems to drain color from my DDs as they recycle and the blooms mature faster. The hot temps and sun also seems to evaporate the fragrant oils faster. August days and nights were really hot with lots of sun, That's when I noticed the lack of color and fragrance. It's seems to run in cycles from year to year. I had a problem with my watering system about the same time also.

I don't think so, Iris_Gal. I *wish* I had kept a copy of that iris order! That is, I did keep a copy, so I *wish* I could find it! :-) Thanks for trying. Thanks, Renee. The rock wall is actually our old stone ice house. The Blushing Rose iris is planted on a stone terrace across from it. Here's a view of the corner of the ice house; you can see how thick the walls are. Ice was cut from a pond (before my time!) and stored in there to feed the family's "ice box." Sorry to say this rose (Robusta) didn't survive the winter. I think last year's severe catepillar damage might have had something to do with it.

Telow, We have a Santa Rosa, an Ozark Premier and several native Mexican plums. I try to keep the Santa Rosa and Ozark Premier pruned to about 12' in height. They are pruned in a nice bowl shape so they are about as wide as they are tall. The native Mexican plum I have planted beside them is more upright because I don't prune it. While the native plums are small, they make wonderful plum jelly. However, in a good year, the other two plum trees make so much fruit that I just leave the native plums for the wild birds and other wildlife. Because plums tend to bloom early in warm winters and then get hit hard by freezing weather, I only get a good crop about once every three years. The last good fruit year was 2010(and it was the best plum and peach year ever here in Oklahoma), I harvested about 130 lbs. from the Santa Rosa, 139 lbs. from the Ozark Premier and 85 lbs. from the peach tree, which I think is a RedHaven. The next time I plant fruit trees, I'll write down their names because my memory is worse and worse every year. For a long time I thought I'd planted Methley, but when it fruited, the fruit was not Methley and I finally figured out it was Ozark Premier. Obviously a family cannot eat approximately 350 lbs. of fresh fruit quickly enough before it goes bad, so I preserved a lot of the plums and peaches and gave some of them away. That summer I froze about 20 quarts of peaches (we're enjoying the next to the last quart this week), dried some plums and turned them into prunes, and made every kind of peach and plum preserves, jams, jellies and spiced butters you can think of....around 175 jars plus another dozen jars of freezer jam. We gave away a lot of that as gifts, but still have some of it in the pantry. Even better, I extracted and froze about 15 or 20 batches of plum juice and it still is in the freezer. Each batch of frozen plum juice, when thawed, will make one batch (about 6-7 pint jars) of plum jelly. Thus, even if this year's plum crop freezes, I'll still be able to make oodles of plum jelly just as if we'd had a great crop. I have the pectin, sugar and jars and will start making plum jelly soon so I can refill the canning shelves with jars of jelly, and empty out a portion of the freezer. It is a bummer when we get a small crop or no crop because of freezing weather or hail, but in a good year, we preserve enough to last us a good long time. Also, in a good year when the harvest is plentiful, we eat them until we are almost sick of them. Someone looked at my plum trees in 2010 right before I began to harvest and commented that I "should have" thinned the fruit. I told him I had removed about 96% of the fruit when I thinned and we still had that many hundreds of fruit left. To me, the hardest thing in the world is the thinning, but if you don't do it, you get plums the size of grapes. I thinned and thinned for days and removed thousands of tiny plums from the trees. His trees produced well also that year, but not nearly as well as ours, and I think maybe he had fewer bees around pollinating when the trees were blooming. We always have a gazillion bees here, likely because we don't use broad-spectrum pesticides. Dawn