My wife and I were excited yeseterday to see that the Yellow Lady Banks Rose has several blossoms which have opened! I took a few pictures today. I started fertilizing the plants with a homemade mixture of compost that I generate from my food preparation, coffee grounds from a coffee shop, alfalfa meal, earthworm castings (one of the few animal ingredients I use in an otherwise veganic garden - from what I can tell, the earthworms benefit from the collection of their droppings; I also sometimes get horse manure from a nearby horse stable where old horses live their lives out and sometimes use bat guano that I brought home years ago from Austin, Texas, where a huge colony spends part of the year), rock phosphate, cotton compost, and lime (except in acid loving plants like azaleas and camellias). I got through all of the roses (except for the rugosa) and the azaleas and hollies at the front of the house.

Here you can see some pictures of Yellow Lady Banks, azaleas starting to open, and blossoms from the other stalk apple tree, not a crabapple. After I took these pictures, I noticed that one of my dwarf apple trees has one set of blooms! It's a mystery to me why, though the stalk apple trees do fine, the dwarf ones have never had apples - I've tried pruning almost not at all, moderately, and severely, and still don't get fruit, though the trees look healthy.