Pruning the Roses

Roses Before 2015 Pruning

 Meredithe has been working on the major renovation of this rose bush in particular for over a year. There are several roses planted along the fence of a similar variety and single plants of various other varieties planted in front of the lattice surrounding this main bush. Last year she removed 50-60% of the bush in the process of freeing the broken arbor and pine trees from the neglected bush. This year she took another 50-60% of the bush selecting the largest, most vigorous stems to form the backbone of the new bush.

We have plans to move the piece of lattice on the South side of the rose garden to the North side sometime soon. We planted 4 small lavender plants underneath it to the South along the driveway to get established before we remove the lattice.

After we reshape the garden from a U shape to an L shape we'll add in other varieties of roses. These new varieties will fill in the openings and help form our beautiful new rose garden!

Roses Before 2016 Pruning

Roses After 2016 Pruning

The 1st Anniversary

 We've owned Gohn Greene Farms for one year! Thanks for coming on this journey with us! When we started a year ago we had a lot of ideas about what we wanted to do for our little piece of land, for ourselves, for the Earth. We worked really hard this year getting the farm ready for a wedding and for providing for our family in the many years to come. Looking back it's almost funny how little we knew on day one. We had no idea what a persimmon tree looked like. Or how aggressively muscadine vines grow.

We didn't know we had jonquils, or honey locust, or wild cherry. We didn't know about the rose bushes planted along the fence, or the gladiolas that wouldn't come up for months.
It's been an awesome learning experience every day. We just wanted to get our hands dirty and learn, and learn we have. We planted apples and paw paws and figs and goji berries. We cleared the underbrush from little sections of forest, selecting for oak and persimmon. We'll be managing the blackberries better this year now that we have an idea of where we think we can control them.
Thanks again, hopefully you'll keep on following our journey this Spring and beyond. We've got some exciting things coming up this year. The muscadines should be our first "crop" of any sizable amount. We'll be pruning a lot of the trees concentrating on training them for the long term. After the wedding raised beds will start to take shape. We'll be putting in the anchor species to start guilds all over the farm. Check back soon, those Spring buds are about to appear, kicking off another growing season at Gohn Greene Farms!

Proposed Planting Map

As promised, here is the proposed planting map for the 10 trees that we will hopefully be able to put in up front this Spring. The Arbor Day Foundation will hopefully be shipping them to us soon.

The two crapemyrtle shrubs, shown in the greenish blue will be going in up at the very front of the property. There is a "temporary" power pole there with some guy wires that I'd like to hide, so the crapemyrtles with their multiple trunks should be able to do that fairly well.

The three american redbuds are shown in light blue. One marking the Western property line, spaced between a catawpa and a bradford pear. Another, just West of the driveway will be placed North of the brown turkey fig, near a proposed future shed. The third will be about 20' North of the driveway over to the neighbors and 20' East of the main driveway.

We're not intending to continue planting in a complete 20'x20' grid like in the back, but the trees are set at the same spacing just in case we change our minds.

The Southern most washington hawthorne is spaced 20' North of the american redbud and the second is 40' North of that. These are shown in pink on the map.

The three white flowering dogwoods, shown in orange, are in a line across the Northern edge of the clearing. The one farthest East will be spaced 40' North of the washington hawthornes. They may be spaced 80' apart, although there currently isn't a plan for more trees along this border requiring us to maintain the pattern.