Why I Oughta...

When you walk into the Home Depot and are hit in the face by the strong smell of cinnamon-scented pinecones, you know it is Amaryllis bulb season.  Home Depot usually carries a few kinds of Christmas flowers (Amaryllis) and bulbs:  Waxed bulbs (That grow on their own), kits (a bulb and a little pot and some planting medium) and individual bulbs.  I've shied away from the kits (due to performance over the years) and have mostly bought all of our Amaryllis bulbs from Wannemakers.  But, the bulbs this year at Home Depot were worth a look. I've posted about the Amaryllis bulbs at Home Depot before.  Here is the post from 2025 when they carried nine (9) types of Amaryllis bulbs and some Paperwhites.  Notably...the Amaryllis bulbs in 2025 were $9.98 each.  I bought three Blossom Peacock bulbs and put them together in a cache pot .   This year?  The one Home Depot we went to recently is carrying just five (5) types of Amaryllis.  And, the...

Five years ago this month, I planted a very small caliper (with a trunk 'injury') Ginkgo tree in our backyard along the southside about half-way back.  The tree went in the ground in October 2021 .  The trunk was basically cracked wide-open ( look at the photos in this post ), but I wrapped it up, supported it with a bamboo pole and hoped for the best.   In the five years since (growing seasons: 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025 and now 2026), the tree has survived.  And, put on some growth.  When it went in the ground, it was about waist-high.  Here, below, is what it looks like in the garden today: That's a little hard to read in terms of where the tree starts/stops.  So, here, below, is an annotated version showing the tip of the tree: I took out the tape measure and the apical meristem (leader) now reaches 96".  So, this is an eight-foot-tall Ginkgo tree.  And, the trunk has thickened-up and is no longer pencil-thin.  I've NOT pruned this ...

In what is probably the final week of my dahlia blooms, I have one plant that is (finally) producing its initial blooms:  Sweet Nathalie.   Last year, I saw my first Sweet Nathalie bloom in early September and talked about how it is a 'slow to bloom' .  This year, the blooms came in mid-October.  Five or six weeks later than 2025.   But, what do they look like?  They're pretty great: Sweet Nathalie Decorative Dahlia Bloom - Blush Pink Sweet Nathalie is billed as a dahlia that compares with one of the dahlias that everyone loves:  Cafe au Lait.  Here's what Longfield says about Sweet Nathalie : If you love the colors of Cafe au Lait, this dahlia is a must-have. Sweet Nathalie walks a similar line between buff and blush pink, but its flowers are about half the size of Cafe au Lait and the shape and color are more consistent. What's interesting about that (for me) is that Sweet Nathalie is my second slowest-to-bloom dahlia.  The one th...

I was recently up in Racine Wisconsin where I spent some time at a (pretty nice) youth sports field complex.  They have a beer garden - which feels *very Wisconsin*.  And, the fields were nice.  Grass was cut short and nicely groomed.  But, over by the bathrooms was a collection of conifers that were worth documenting.  Someone planted a number of things in a little cluster and over the years they've matured into a really nice-looking conifer collection.   One of the standouts is this large, columnar Weeping White Spruce.  It is an almost-perfect specimen.  Shooting straight up in the air.  Narrow.  And really quite nice: Planted in the beds around the Weeping White Spruce, they had two pairs of other weeping confirs.  Two of them are (I'm pretty sure) Weeping Norway Spruces that they haven't really trained upwards.  The reach about five or six feet tall, then begin to cascade down and all around.  Interesting to see ...

Tired of those Mums that you bought for your front porch keep splaying wide open and flopping over, revealing an empty crown?  That's what happens when the tips of the flower stems get weighted down with the blooms, as they open up and grow.  That is...if you keep them alive until then.  Mums are hard to make work, but when they do, they're beautiful.   So, you likely know all the tips by now:  soak the root ball in water.  Water from the bottom-up.  Don't buy them too early in the season. Here's the best tip I can give you in terms of something you can do to keep them looking good: Wire them up.   Wrap a wire or string around the stems to corral them together.  And, keep the crown of the mums together and the stems upright. Here, below are a couple of photos of the Mums we brought home for our front porch this weekend.  I used padded garden wire around the stems: I also placed the nursery pot into a garden trug that is full of...

I've grown Dinnerplate dahlias on purpose .  And, this season I grew Dinnerplate Dahlias NOT on purpose.  The one in question is Mero Star.  NOT, Metro Star.  I have two of them in the front yard - one in the Island Bed and one under the Triumph Elm tree by our front porch. I posted the first photo of one of these blooms at the end of July when they were just starting .  And, the petals were dark red, almost purple.  As the season has gone on, the white tips/outline have emerged.  These are really lovely when they are on the plant: Mero Star Dahlia in Bloom They, however, have very short stems.  Both of the plants are healthy and didn't really have any problems.  No virus.  No pests (no Spider Mites!!!).  I'm planning on digging up and saving these tubers, but I'm not sure that I'll grow them again.  Or, if I do, I won't be growing them for cut flowers.  That means they will need to be in spot where the blooms can show-off...