God blessed me in my rose garden!

When we bought the house we are currently living in, the rose garden caught my eyes first. I am absolutely fond of roses.

My rose garden during Spring 2006

But roses are hard work. You have to take care of it every week. The last two years I’ve neglected my rose garden a lot. Since the roses where at least 10 years old, I decided to take out all the roses and start all over again.

During the July holidays CJ took out all the roses

and CJ and Josua started to prepare the soil for the new roses.

We are living in the Western Cape and we have only clay soil, which is easily the worst kind of soil you can have for roses. Clay soil has NO drainage and roses need good drainage. Since we are always in favour of organic products we worked Bounce Back and agricultural lime into the clay soil.

Danika taking care of Andrew’s foot after he’d stepped on a rose thorn.

Daniel is checking the depth of the hole.

Andrew and David are watering the garden.

This past week we also worked in a huge amount of horse manure, which CJ got from the stables at the horse riding school.

So, today was the day I decided to go and buy new roses! All hybrid tea roses are beautiful and I decided to use fragrance as my criteria for choosing my new roses. I can only plant 6-10 roses on the peace of garden I have available. I did a search on google and got hold of this side by Gardens and Roses with their top ten lists of fragrance roses. The more I searched the more excited I become. But I’ve never been able to find the roses I’m looking for, so I tried to put a lid on my excitement. At the breakfast table I asked Christo and the children to pray that God would help me find some of the roses on my list or to give me peace on whatever roses I could find and to let the nursery have nice fragrance roses. It was so special to hear every ones prayer, from little David 2 ½ years old and Andrew 4 years old up to my Husband asking God to go before me in choosing my roses. This was such a minor request, but I know God wants to be part of every area of our lives and we like to show our children God cares about our hearts desires, no matter how small or insignificant.

My mother, mother-in-law and neighbor all recommend me to Ludwig roses, somewhere in the Stellenbosch area, so I quickly did a search to find them. Great was my surprise to find they have summer pruning classes in September.

Just before I left, early this afternoon, I quickly gave Ludwig Roses a call and from the start their eagerness to help me was refreshing. The lady on the phone asked me if I knew which roses I was looking for. When I told her I had a list, she offered to check the names on their computer. To my surprise they had ALL the roses available I had on my list of the top ten fragrance roses. I could not believe it!!

What a positive experience! Heidi-Mari, Josua, Danika and Daniel went with me. As I stopped at the rose nursery (they ONLY sell roses) I could only see rows on rows of roses! When I got out of the car, a man was already waiting to assist me. Inside the building they had a computer with photo slides of all the roses they have in stock and he showed me all the roses I was looking for on the slides. I’ve never in my life met someone that knows his roses so well. Then he took us outside and started to pick the strongest shrub in each category between the rows and rows of roses. You cannot imagine my joy and excitement. I was feeling like a young girl on a hot summer day allowed to choose the sweetest, biggest ice cream after a long, cold winter! We also bought Vigorosa as rose food. Within an hour we were back at home, with me proudly showing my roses to the rest of the family and keeping a careful eye on the unloading of my roses.

While we were all resting this afternoon, I was pondering on the favour and blessing of the Lord on my rose project. I can truly agree with Pr. 16:3 “Commit your work to the Lord, then it will succeed.” We’ve asked God to go before us and as usual He was so faithful!

We still need to get some peanut shell or bark chips to work into the clay soil and then CJ has to start digging 10 holes in the ground. We will plant the roses next Saturday, when dad has an off weekend.

Watch out for photos of my planted roses!