Arlene, I feel your pain. Peak season is usually the week of 7/4 here in zone 7A, and I'm wondering if I will even have blooms by then. Even some of the EE's don't have scapes yet. For extra entertainment, the foliage looks like crap from a hailstorm a few weeks back, plus slug damage from 7 days of rain and honestly I'm just to tired to deal with it. I sprayed with Cleary's 3336 to minimize leaf streak and that's all I'm doing until fall.
But just to humor myself, I'll go out and take 500 pictures of the one bloom a day on a new arrival. So far I've had a total of 4 blooms on some new Emmerich's and I have enough photos of them to fill 200 albums.
Greatest Gift of All struggled to open yesterday in the cool temps and like a little kid nothing would do until I forced it open, breaking a sepal. When you only have one bloom for the day, you want to see it, even when it's been mangled.
