Friday, February 17, 2012

When Trimming Lavender...

When trimming lavender around your pool, make sure you:
- trim them early in the morning, before the honey bees wake up.  Trimming them in the late morning or afternoon will really anger the bees who are harvesting pollen from them by the dozens, and those girls' stings are painful and fatal to the bees too.

- use really sharp shears.  Dull shears will not make clean cuts and damage the plants.

- retaining an old, long, cardboard box (from a LCD HD TV box, for example) makes a handy way to easily collect the trimmings

- trim an inch or two more beyond the edge of the pool deck, so that you don't need to trim again for a few more weeks.

- don't bother trying to retain & display in a vase all the blossom trimmings, as they will wilt within just a few hours.  The hydrostatic pressure the plant produces keeps the blossoms nearly vertical.  Lop off the plant, and there's no easy way to retain that pressure.

This weekend will be a massive planting effort for the Valentines Day French Lavender.  Hopefully, it will all go well (digging of holes in Arizona top soil the consistency of concrete, using a contractor grade pick, uprooting a severely frost damaged bougainvillea, engineering adequate drip irrigation and elevation sloping in an effort to not drown the plants, and then re-surrounding the new plantings with ubiquitous Arizona yard gravel, all without getting stung, punctured, or pulling any back muscles).

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