I Wanted to Show You…

I wanted to show you on December 7th that the Christmas roses, Helleborus niger, were blooming, and it was warm enough for a bee to visit!

But Mailchimp, which is the service I use to automatically send an email at 9 am EST each day to subscribers if there is a new blog post, held up a stop sign the day before, followed by an email explaining, “You’ve used up all your free credits for the month. So if you don’t pay, we don’t send…”

Until the month was over and my free credits for the month renewed.

Which is why you got an email yesterday, December 11th, with a blog post from December 5th.

I ran the numbers and figured out with the number of subscribers I have, to continue to use Mailchimp without paying, I should stick to less than 20 blog posts in a month, give or take. So I’ll skip a few days here and there. (Thus ends my blog post-a-day streak which went for about 41 days?)

Anyway, back to gardening and flowers and plants and other related topics!

Yes, a bee visited a Christmas rose in my garden on December the 7th. That is reason enough for me to have these perennials in my garden. (The other reason is flowers in December!) Temps were in the 50s when the bee visited. I took advantage of those warmer temps and spent most of that day and the next day outside doing various and sundry tasks to prepare the garden for winter, including mowing up leaves and using them to cover the bases of the figs. That should help them get through winter.

My quest to find some more potted Christmas roses for sale continues. Everyone tells me that Trader Joe’s will have them, and I’ve purchased them there in the past. We’ll see. Trader Joe’s isn’t close so I’ll have to plan a road trip.

In other news, I also didn’t go live on Instagram as promised in my previous post. Again, the technology stopped us. However, we did record an interview on Zoom. When it gets posted, I’ll share a link because, as I said to Dee on the podcast later when talking about it, “I said witty and clever things!” Sort of. And I talked about my children’s book, The Christmas Cottontail.

I also wrote about two more Lost Ladies of Garden Writing on the new Substack newsletter I started, which I call “Lost Ladies of Garden Writing.” If you enjoyed those posts on my blog in the past, please subscribe to the Substack newsletter because that’s where I’ll be writing about them going forward. Yesterday, I featured Daisy Thomson Abbott. I just learned about her a few days ago. Even if you could care less about her personal story, which is one of the most interesting ones I’ve come across, you’ll want to know her method for getting a poinsettia to re-bloom. Timely advice today for today written in 1932!

And now, we are kind of caught up! Thanks for reading to the end!