Dayton "Dirt" - May 5, 2012

Last Sunday morning I recorded 30º F on my thermometer but I’ve heard of different areas going as low as 26ºF. Especially hard hit was the Lake County area as temperatures everywhere fell to 26ºF and froze the flowering azaleas even close to the houses! What makes the cold temperature in Lake County so strange is the fact that Lake Erie is usually a buffer from such cold temperatures in fall and spring but somehow it did not help even one to two miles close to the lakeshore. At the nursery, the rain gauge is filling up although I’m hoping for much more rain. The greenhouses are just loaded with plants of every color and shade in the perennial house and annual flowering house in anticipation of the good weather finally appearing. The azalea and rhododendron are so beautiful in our shade house with splashes of color all over the nursery. After surviving the frosts the past couple of weeks the azaleas in the garden are magnificent from shades of red, purple, white, pink and lavender. The weeds in the garden are another story. Although their not that tall now, it seems that they have survived from endless windy days and our having to prepare for frost in which both take away our opportunity to spray roundup on the little devils. In the greenhouse it’s hard to believe the size of the flowering plants as many of them were so small when they arrived as an unrooted cutting that I had trouble handling them. The geraniums from our stock plants are so big and bushy in the one gallon nursery containers that they look like shrubs just loaded with flowers! It’s time for me to go as a write this blog at 6 a.m. because the greenhouse is already calling. Tom