Murder in the Rose Garden

It has been an intense weekend. As you know, we are still restoring Cà Rossa: this is the turn of the stable. There’s this 3-cows stable joint to the house that we have used as a storing room during the move and it was still packed with stuff. This week the guys will come and dig the floor, then they’re going to put gravel for at least 1mt depth and then the new cement floor. This is going to be what English call ‘the shed’ and ‘the greenhouse’ altogether. But we call it stable even if there won’t be cows in.
Anyway, there was this job of emptying the stable to be done but I didn’t feel like.
So I told Ale there were roses dying in the pot-ghetto under the willows: he could have dealt with boxes, I would have cared of the roses. I started weeding behind the vitex agnus castus and a bit later I started digging holes.

I came to unbury some rather scary bones (one has big horrible teeth on!) and that let me puzzled. I’ve been told the old tenant was a strange person.

Scary bones next to Rosa 'Tuscany'

I think something nasty happend in the past in the rose garden, so I’ve put Special Agents Mina and Rudy to investigate. They told me they’re keeping the case confidential, because we have a mole on the department (of roses actually). I think we have more than one.

special agents Mina and Rudy investigating: totally on the case

I’ll let you know what they find out as soon as the case won’t be confidential anymore.

I’ve planted several roses on the garden: r. gallica ‘Splendens’, r. gallica ‘Aimable Rouge’, ‘Chloris’, ‘Tuscany’, ‘Celsiana’, ‘Adam Messerich’, ‘Therese Bugnet’, ‘Omar Khayyam’ (which I love), and another couple I don’t actually remember, one of which was nearly dead.

I forgot to tell you I am a shop manager, so my weekends start on sunday and finish on monday 3.00 p.m.

This morning drinking my coffee I looked from the kitchen window and I realized I haven’t take care of the gravel garden for quite a long time. There’s no gravel on it yet. There are barely plants actually.

amelanchier lamarckii and the purple barrel

I’m afraid I’m loosing my 3 service-berries. I think they couldn’t settle down in there: too sunny, too dry and they probably need pap. So I gave them plenty of water and chemical nutrients (iron). One day people will pay to come and see my garden. Look at those erigeron karwiskianus among those santolina aren’t they beautiful?!

(My father gave me that purple barrel, it’s about 50 years old and very heavy. He painted it purple because he only had a few red antirust color and a few grey-blue one. He mixed up.)

The future gravel garden

I weeded too. I’m glad you can see my kniphofia just coming into bloom at the edge of the gravel garden (you can see it’s the edge because from there on there won’t be gravel in the future) and you can also see my multi-purpose weeding chair. It’s that blue thing there. I discovered I can use it as a box too, so I can collect the weeds I’ve just piled and compost them. I can even turn it upside down and soak the plants before i plant them ( it needs to be filled with water, the multi-purpose chair).

from top left, clockwise: pasta, yellow courgette, cherry tomatoes, onion, chili 'Hungarian hot wax' and basil

I had the time to harvest the first ‘Hungarian hot wax’ pepper this morning, I’ve been harvesting cherry tomatoes and yellow courgetts for a couple of weeks by now. I decided to cook some pasta and try this hot chili classified (3) on a scale from (0) to (8). It tastes nicely hot.

😉

Tags: chili, dogs, food, gravel garden, perennials, rose garden

• 4 July 2011
• Cà Rossa
• 2 Comments