Seedfork's blog: Perfect gardening day-Planted Cyclamen and Snapdragons

Beautiful clear day today after a very damp day yesterday. The temp when I drove past the bank around three o'clock this afternoon was 56 degrees.
I got out this morning once the temps got up to 40 degrees, that's about my limit for enjoyable gardening. I took advantage of the "rain" yesterday and did some weeding. The beds look fantastic, the lawn looks very weedy, I bent over to pull a few weeds from the lawn and just said forget it... too many to even make a dent in them.
I got out my pad and pencil and drew up the rose bed, the chain link fence is the back border of the bed and the poles are spaced about ten feet apart. There are six sections each ten feet, and the bed is about four feet wide. All the roses are labeled and now mapped so I know what each one is again.
It seems like I go through this every year, my labels get stolen by the squirrels and I have to redo them .
Being it was such a beautiful day (even if I am a month early) I decided to prune the roses and get the bed really looking good. I got all those pruned, pruned the two climbing roses, but did not get around to the other small bed with the three Knockouts nor the two perennial beds that just have a few roses in each bed. I should be able to do them tomorrow, or I may decide to wait a few more weeks. I don't think it really matters all that much here in this location.
The chipmunks had dug holes all along the side of the front walkway, so I hauled compost around to the front and filled in all along the edge. They had it dug down so it would be easy to turn an ankle if one stepped of the edge of the walkway.
Rested up a while then took a trip up to Lowe's checking on the seed racks, still not out! But I did have a $50.00 debit card rebate from the phone company so I went ahead and bought a bag of Milorganite, a bag of 13-13-13, two bags of Perlite and some reduced plants. I purchased three pots of Snapdragons and three pots of Cyclamen. They were all marked down to $1.00 each.
The Cyclamen was still in bloom but it had about finished , I had one plant before and it stayed alive for a couple of years, but I always enjoyed the foliage more than the blooms. They don't last very long in the temps we have here. The Snapdragons I think I can saved but they looked pretty bad, I added them to the inside the fence perennial bed. They normally only last one season for me
but I have managed two years out of some.
On the way back from Lowe's I make a quick detour to my leaf pickup route, and scored four huge bags for the most beautiful dried leaves, they were the kind I just love to get. Not hard like oak but very soft and brittle and they crumple very easily. I put all four bags down in the triangle daylily bed in the bog. I had covered that area late last year with grass clippings and they were about decayed away, so the thick coat of dried crumpled leaves was perfect for there.

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