Why I Oughta...

Another week and (sadly) another tree is lost in our yard.  Just last week, I shared the news of one of our Earth Day 2018 trees - a Weeping Flowering Cherry Tree - died this season .  Today, you can see in the photo above, that we've lost one of our small Canadian Hemlock trees that I planted on the North side of our property out back. This is the seventh tree I've lost since planting and the second of this season. The other six trees that have died are: Other "Lost" trees include: a Chanticleer Pear, a Dawn Redwood, a Corkscrew Willow, a Fraser Fir, a Canadian Hemlock, Weeping Flowering Cherry. And now *this* Hemlock.  This means it is the second Canadian Hemlock that I've planted that has died.   The dead (or mostly dead) Hemlock in the photo above is the one on the far right of the photo in this post.   The other five of them seem to be doing well with all of them showing both a little stress and some new growth. Here's the full list of...

Our first Disneyland Rose bush is in bloom.  And it is a stunner.  We received it as an anniversary gift in September of 2017 and I planted it that Fall .  Wasn't totally sure it was going to make it.  But, survive it did.  And now the area where I planted it is a lush garden of green.  You can kind of tell from the photo above that it is surrounded with hostas and ferns.  But, compare this June 2019 blooming photo with the same Disneyland Rose plant one year ago .  Quite a different view. Not just because of the filling-in of the rest of the bed, but also the height and bloom numbers of this particular plant.  It is doing really well and provides a great pop of orange and pink in the sea of green.  Love it.   Last Fall, Nat's Mom gave us two more and I planted them on the side of the house .  They're, umm, not doing as well as this one.  But they are one year younger.    I'll snap a couple of pho...

It's not dark yet.  But it's getting there .  Had the time of my life with my partner as we fell in love all over again. 

These large stemmed hostas are what I've been calling our "Teardown Hostas" that I planted right outside our kitchen window in the backyard.  I put them in the ground in October of 2017 and they came back for the past few seasons and have filled in the space really nicely.  Here's a photo of these same Hostas emerging for the first time in Spring of 2018.   I haven't posted about these particular flowers in the past, but I did post late last Summer about some white flowering hostas that are also, kinda, teardown hostas.  This post shows some in our backyard that throw off white flowers that I pulled out of the front yard of the house we tore down before we built.   The photo you see above show a different kind of stalk coming out of the hosta plant.  Normally, I see a series of those trumpet-shaped flowers that come from a central stalk.  If you look at the photo above, you'll see that it is more like a central flower that has ...

Just like I did last year, I planted a few Elephant Ear bulbs in containers on our back patio.  I like the way they add a little bit of tropical interest and large leaf contrast to the pots and I think that I'll likely continue to add them (or something like them) going forward because this is the second year that I've had success with them.  Above (and below), you can see the first of our ordinary Colocasia start to unfurl.  I also planted a blackstem variety, but I don't remember which container that was in and I'm *pretty sure* that this isn't it.  At least...the stem isn't currently black, ya know? Here's a look at similar Elephant Ears in a container on our back patio last Summer (2018) .  And here's a peek at all of our containers from our back patio last July .  If/when the Black Stem Elephant Ear makes an appearance, I'll post a few photos.    

I drank a few of these 100 Ans de Coca-Cola en France bottles and cans during my trip to Paris for the Air Show.  Turns out, this is the first corporate campaign the company has run in-country .  Here's my view of the bottles and cans that I ran into.  And one cup...doesn't have the 100 years thing on it, but, its from Disneyland Paris.   Kinda interesting they didn't embrace the whole #ShareaCoke thing. Here's the little film they put together to mark 100 years together .

Oh, you know.  Just a giant thumb sticking out like a...well...sore thumb.  In La Defense.  Details here .  "Le Pouce" was the first piece out outdoor art that struck me in Paris on a recent trip there. Certainly not the last. But the first.

One of the items on  my 2019 gardening to-do list (addendum)  was to make sure I got around to wiring up the new Gold Cone Junipers that I planted this Spring.   When  I picked them up , I was drawn to the promise of their bright needles and how they filled a big part of my desire to add conifers to our landscape.  In  that original post , I referenced how a pro-gardener recommended that these particular junipers get wired up to avoid any sort of Winter/snow damage.  That's what this post is for:  documenting that I actually wired them.  The top photo shows one of the Gold Cone Junipers all wired up with a green coated metal garden wire.  Compare that photo above with the photo of the same shrub  in this photo .  I tucked in all the leggy new growth and bound it to the core of the plant.  Here's a closer look at the wire:  The shrub in the foreground is wired up.  The one in the background is not...

I'm calling this one:  our Snow Fountains Weeping Cherry tree is dead.  Didn't make it to year two.  I planted this tree on Earth Day 2018 , so it is just outside of the one-year warranty window.    And the tree was looking good in April as it had set buds last Fall.    I wasn't ever really satisfied with the location, so having it die isn't the end of the world. Using the list from my most recent Weeping White Spruce post , this is the sixth tree that I've lost since we started planting and the first one lost this season. Other "Lost" trees include:  a Chanticleer Pear, a Dawn Redwood, a Corkscrew Willow, a Fraser Fir, a Canadian Hemlock and now this Weeping Flowering Cherry. Here's the full list of trees that we've put into the yard since we bought the property in 2016 and moved in during the Summer of 2017. 35 trees planted. 29 trees currently alive and adding to our landscape. 2017 (9 planted. 3 Died. 6 of the original annual t...

There I was...walking through the garden center of our local Home Depot and what do I see?  A half of a pallet of bags of Milorganite.  Shortage?  What shortage ?!?  I mentioned the potential Milorganite shortage in my initial post about starting to use the stuff . There were about 30 bags of the fertilizer on the pallet.  Did I take all of them?  Nope.  But, I did take 12 bags.  That's two applications for this season.  If I go back and see more, I'll buy 12 more to hoard for a late Fall and next May application.  I also used the Menards site to see if they had inventory and to my surprise, every Wisconsin location is loaded!  Thinking I'll likely take a drive to Kenosha on a weekend we're up at the lake. At the top of the post is a photo of six of the bags.  Below are the other six.   (oh...and a bag of Ironite!) I've thrown down one application of Milorganite this year and after I get the results back from...

Last week in the post about how I had bought my first run of Humic Acid (granular), I mentioned that I was going to test my soil before applying.  Welp, today is that day.  I bought two Soil Savvy Soil Test Kits after watching Ryan Knorr on YouTube talk about how to collect a sample .   There are a variety of ways you can test your soil including a few that you can buy at Menards and mix up on the spot, but this test is priced a bit higher, requires you to send away a sample and the posts some online results for you.  So, why two?  You can probably imagine that I'd want to get a test from my front yard and my back.  But, you'd be wrong.  When we built our house, the entire front yard was a massive mud pit.  And so was the back.  For about the first 100 feet.  And that's where we laid sod.  Based on the soil type in our landscape beds, I'm pretty sure that everywhere there is sod, there's a lot of terrible clay soil.  ...

I mumbled that to myself like 10x a day the past few days. 

Early last Spring, I found a large cast iron urn planter on Craigslist in LaGrange and added it to our front yard landscape .  It is BIG and HEAVY and it hasn't moved since we filled it last year.   Nat has expressed that she doesn't love it in this location, but I haven't moved it yet.  And, the bad news is that I filled it this season already.  This post is to document what this thing looks like in June of 2019. You can see that I've gone ahead and applied the whole thrill/fill/spill thing.  As we get later into the heat of the Summer and Fall, I'll swap these out for something else. 

Another day, another tree that we planted in the yard.  This one, while isn't technically in the "dwarf" category, is another purposely-small tree:  A Hakuro Nishiki Dappled Willow Tree.  Welp....this is actually - according to the tag - a "Deciduous Shrub", but in Tree Form.  So, I'm calling it a tree.  I'm pretty sure that this is a grafted tree, but I can't really tell where it was grafted.  I'll post some closer photos if I can find the graft spot/line in the tree.   But, since this is a tree, this is #35 in terms of planting since we bought the property in 2017.  This is a tree that we had (and I bought it on a whim) back at our old house in Elmhurst.  We planted it on the northside of our backwalk, adjacent to the garage.  It was a stunner.   I loved how it looked.  Nat loved it, too.  It shoots out these beautiful - and almost celebratory - willow limbs that are full of color. Pinks, greens, whites...

This marks the eighth tree that I've added to our backyard this season - and all eight of them (so far) have been conifers.  This one being a Dwarf Alberta Spruce tree.  The most recent tree that I planted was this Weeping White Spruce tree earlier this month .    Those of you who have kept up with things around here, you may remember that #8 on my to-do list for the season was to plant some conifers .   These eight trees are all small (tiny Hemlocks, especially!), but this is the first "dwarf" tree in the yard.   But, all of them are conifers.  This one was picked out by the Bird for her "Earth Day Tree" this year, but it took us more than a month to get into the ground.    And it is planted right adjacent to last year's tree that she planted - a Chanticleer Pear flowering tree .   So, eight conifer trees.  Plus three conifer shrubs - when we added these Gold Cone Junipers to the other side of the property ...

Look at this Gold Cone Juniper being all showy with it's new gold foliage.  Compare this photo to what this shrub looked like when I bought and planted it in early May of this year.   Remarkable difference in the color.  Also note that the new growth is, indeed, kind of *loose* in terms of opening up the shrub a bit.  What I learned when I first bought these is that they need to be wired or twine'd up ahead of Winter .  Reminder to self:  wire up the Junipers this Fall.

All the way in the back of our lot is a tree that the kids climb from time-to-time.  Back there, underneath that tree was the sweetest little variegated hosta plant that I just noticed late last Summer.  By then, it had been trampled by little kid feet.   This Spring, I decided to be proactive and get it out of the spot where it was going to be stomped on and move it.    Last May, I picked up two different hosta varieties (Christmas Tree and Fantabulous) and planted them around the large Oak Tree that we have a rope swing hanging from in the yard.  If you go check out that post, you'll see that the landscape plan calls for hostas around the tree .   So, I figured, I'd take this little hosta and move it to right around that tree.  This photo doesn't really give you a sense for the scale of the leaves, but they're small.  And the color of this is quite nice - the variegated edge is yellow, not white.    This is one t...

The last time I posted about this Weeping Cherry tree in the far reaches of our yard was back in April when I showed the buds that had set the previous Fall .  Today, it is struggling.  Not dead yet, but on the way to being put on the "LOST" list.  You can see a few green leaves on some of the limbs, but most of them are bare.  Some of the limbs have dried leaves on them.  Perhaps overwatered?  I'd be surprised if it was because the tree didn't get enough water.  Polar Vortex, maybe?  Not sure. This was one of our Earth Day Trees from 2018 and it seemed to be doing just fine last year.  However, it *did* have a shoot come off of the trunk - below the graft - that I thought was an indication of a totally healthy tree.  However, now... in retrospect, it might have been a sign that the tree was struggling for life and it sent out the shoot to ensure that it has enough energy to survive. 

Way back in January of this year, I posted a link to a 2019 gardening trends piece that mentioned that "gabion-style walls" were going to be hot this year .  If you aren't familiar with a gabion wall, go read that post where I unpack the whole thing .  On a recent run to pick up a sandwich out by Seven Bridges one weekend, I came across Ike & Oak Brewing that has these large gabion walls set up around their patio.  You can see a few of them in the photo above.    On trend, it seems.

This year, I'm trying a few different things with my yard including tending to it by myself (instead of having someone else cut it), trying Milorganite instead of a traditional 4-step synthetic fertilizer program, mixing and spreading my own herbicide blends and even trying to use a soil temperature tool to time the application of various things .   There are a few more things that I have planned including the application of this product you see in the post above.  But, first...a soil test.  Yes, I'm going to test the soil we have, but I'll post more about that when it arrives.  I have a few choices to make in terms of how to pick the areas for testing. Now, back to this package of The Andersons Humic Acid.  As I've talked about in the past, I've been spending more and more time looking at other folks on YouTube talking about their lawns and what-have-you and one of the products that I've seen a few times now is Humic Acid.  I poked around an...