Why I Oughta...

Last September, I posted a series of photos showing how I was taking down a Buckthorn tree in the far reaches of our backyard .  It was a small tree, but took some time between cutting and digging out the roots.  I mentioned that I had a few more Buckthorn trees around - and because they're an invasive tree - I wanted to get rid of them over time.  In fact, I included 'Buckthorn removal' in my 2019 To-Do List addendum and didn't get around to taking down any of the trees this Summer.  That changed this past weekend, when I was out back and tried to take on this tree you see here.  This is a medium tree, but it is in a state of both alive and dead - at the same time.  I know that seems strange, but I'm pretty sure that the main tree is dead, but the suckers on this thing keep coming back, so there's life in there somewhere.  I first started with sawing off a bunch of the limbs.  Then I cut it in half - and let the top-half tumble down into the bed.  In

No...not that kind of weed tree .  I'm talking about a weed tree that has grown up and isn't really much of a desirable tree.  Or, is it a Walnut tree?  You can see the trunk being very tall and thin.  The tree is twelve or so feet tall and has a set of leaves that look just like Walnut tree leaves.  We have quite a few large Walnut trees around the yard, so it isn't beyond reason that a Walnut would have rooted and grown into a tree, I would think? The leaves of Walnut trees are "alternate compound" or "pinnate leaves" and so, too. are the leaves of this tree. I know a little bit of the Black Locust tree - which is (I think) a "weed tree".  It has similar shaped leaves, but the tips are rounded where these are pointy.  It is "not recommended" by the Morton Arboretum .   I'm pretty confident that the tree in question - in the red circle - is NOT a black locust.   But, is it a Black Walnut tree?   Here's a clo

I took this photo above a week or so ago - with the Greenspire Lindens being entirely green and not having lost a leaf yet this year.  Putting this here in the [garden diary] to note how much the trees hve grown and to document the progress of the Candelabra that I've made this year. I'll take another photo once the leaves fall off to get a sense for the structure, but below you can see the candelabra that is taking shape.  The red indicates the branch structure that exists so far and the yellow show the bamboo supports that are in place. Winter gives me a chance to look at this double candelabra espalier and decide if it is going to be five cordons or six cordons or limbs in the candelabra.  Here - below - in teal - is the six limb version.  It looks tight to me. On the left, this means that I need: a new 2nd from the bottom left limb. a longer bottom limb on the right.  a decision between three and four on both sides. a new fifth left limb cutting the top

I bought this small Weeping White Spruce in the end of May this year and planted it on the southside of our property close to the fenceline here (it is a columnar, very narrow tree !) at the beginning of June .  I seem to have failed to measure it and include it in my annual yard tree inventory post this year , so I thought it would be worth sharing this thing as it goes into Winter. I don't have the best luck with Winter conifers.  This past season, I lost my other weeping tree - the Alaskan Weeping Cedar - even though I tried to protect it with Wilt-Pruf.  Welp, actually, I don't have much luck with conifers anytime as I also lost my first Fraser Fir last season . I'm torn as to if I should apply the Wilt-Pruf to this Weeping White Spruce, but I'm thinking that it can't hurt.  Last Winter was brutal and the Cedar Tree was just a casualty of it - like the buds on all of my flowering trees and the Wilt-Pruf didn't seem to help on the Cedar.  If I mix up

Post where I initially pondered walking path edging On my post yesterday where I scored my yard/garden activity for the year , I included some initial thoughts about what I am thinking about doing next year.  On that list was to build the first section of the backyard 'path'.  I mentioned that I also need to figure out the edging - because what I start with is what I'll end up using going forward. I recently saw this photo from Laura at Garden Answer where she was sharing the beds out front of her chicken coop and was drawn to the brick edging that she's using. View this post on Instagram Chicken coop area is all cleaned up! Next thing to do is add some greenhouse plastic to the top and sides of their run to give them a warmer, dry place to move around for the winter! It’s going to look so classy... 😆🤦‍♀️ Oh well, happy chickens are more important! A post shared by Garden Answer (@gardenanswer) on Oct

Earlier this year, I set out a Yard & Garden To-Do List and a To-Do List Addendum that outlined 17 (10 on original list, 7 on Addendum) tasks that I wanted to tackle.  With the month of October coming to a close, I think it is worth taking a look and scoring myself. So...how did I do?  7 of the 10.  Missed on the Belgian Fence, Angel Topiary and raised beds. The original ten items on the list : 1.  Improve the soil.  Check . And Check .  And Check . 2.  Plant a Belgian Fence.  Nope. 3.  Try metal frame topiary.  Kinda.  I tried pruning small shrubs for topiary or bonsai . 4.  Do the Angel topiary.  Nope. 5.  Plant a Yew hedge.  Yes! 6.  Move Automower Boundary wires.  Yes.  No more getting caught up under the trampoline. 7.  Prune the Linden Espalier.  Yes . 8.  Add conifers.  A couple of them .  And planted six tiny Canadian Hemlocks.  Lost one so far . 9.  Build and plant a raised bed vegetable garden.  Nope. 10.  Remember the 'path'.  Yes.  Behind

It appears that we have a confused rhododendron in our backyard.  Nat told me that one of our two rhododendrons were flowering out back and I didn't believe her.  Wrong time of year.  I went back there - and sure enough - she was right.  A small purple flower had emerged from one of the buds that the shrub has been setting as it heads into dormancy.  This same thing happened last year with our Chanticleer Pear flowering tree out front - it flowered in early November .  Back to the rhododendron, it appears (for now) that there's just one flower, so I'm not concerned.  This story claims that it isn't that rare for them to flower in the Autumn.  I'll return to these shrubs before the Winter sets in with a Wilt-Pruf application like I've did last year . 

Yesterday, I posted a photo of the large Oak tree that we use for our tree swing and today, I'm posting another larger tree in our yard that is pre-losing its leaves:  one of our Catalpa trees.  We have four of them and there are actually three in this photo.  The large one in the middle of course coupled with a Walnut tree on the left that has lost all of its leaves already.  But, tucked on in on either side of the Walnut tree?  A pair of small Catalpa trees: You may or may not know Catalpa trees, as I didn't either until we moved in and inherited these.  They're a pretty unique tree because they are considered what I would call an 'All of the above' tree .  That means they're a shade tree.  And a flowering tree.  And an ornamental tree.  They flower in the late Spring and have beans in the Fall.  And the leaves are H-U-G-E.  I like a lot about these trees, but I don't think that I've ever come across them in the nursery. They're native,

Last Summer, I documented the 'mighty' Oak Tree that we inherited in our backyard here on the blog in June.  As we're moving to late October, I wanted to post here the view - looking northeast - of the same tree and canopy before it drops all of its leaves.  This was a Mast Year and it dropped thousands of acorns, but like always, the leaves are clinging on to "fall" what seems to be the last leaves in the yard every year. There's no way to know how old this tree is, but I know we lop'd off some limbs before we built and opened up the tree a bit.  That means that this year, we saw quite a bit of growth on the large limbs to 'puff them up' a bit with new branches/leaf clumps.  The tips grew just fine, but that exposure of new parts of the central limbs has allowed the tree to fatten up a bit more this season.

Our little Red Maple Sun Valley Maple Tree in the far back of our yard is putting on a little bit of a Fall show right now.  As the name implies, it is *supposed* to be a lovely red show.  Like this .  Ours isn't, ummm, red.  But it *is* yellow.  And that's what happened last year, too.  Here's a post from early November that shows the tree in early Fall and then during its yellow phase .  This Maple tree was planted on Earth Day in 2018 and was a tiny little thing.  It has since grown up a bit - both in height and caliper.  In the [tree inventory] of 2018, it topped out at 96" in June of 2018 . This year's [tree inventory], showed it had gained 12" and is now 108" tall .  This is a tree planted not for today, but for the long term. (Remember..." He who plants Oaks Maples, looks forward to future ages ...") It is a tree that is for 20 years from now and one that we planted in the rear part of the yard because we know that one day, the

Above is a look at the four boxwoods that are planted right outside of our Kitchen windows next to the foundation.  I last posted a photo of these four shrubs back in April of this year when I was taking off the Winter Burn from them and shaping them a little bit.   They've really grown quite a bit and green'd up on their tips in a nice way. A lot of boxwoods in our neighborhood took hard hits from Winter Burn this past Winter - including a few of ours in front - but these seem to have totally recovered nicely.  The two in front are now larger than the two in back.  I was initially thinking of clipping these into nicely shaped orbs, but now that I've seen the Jacques Wirtz-inspired hedge of boxwoods outside of the Fedex World Headquarters , I'm thinking I can grow these together and make a more cloud-like shape out of all four of them.  The other thing to note in this [ Garden Diary ] post is the other plant in the photo.  No...it isn't a weed.  Well, not a

This is the first season that I've really paid a lot of attention to the lawn in any sort of meaningful way.  I've posted about it all year, but normally, I just dealt with the length of the grass and that's about it.  Weeds?  Sure.  Fertilizer?  If I remembered.  But, this year, I've upped my cutting and feeding game.  And also, for the first time used some herbicides to tackle the weeds. In the far back of the yards, I had a pretty serious Creeping Charlie issue that is a result of the lawn being untouched since before we moved in our house.  I posted in late May about how I started to use a Blue Spray Pattern Indicator in the sprayer to know where I was putting down the treatment .  I had both Wild Violet and Creeping Charlie running through the yard and the herbicide worked well.  In my mind, the blue pattern indicator additive was part of the reason for the efficacy because I was able to tell both how much and where I was putting it down. This Fall (the past

In all of the [garden diary] posts I've made here over the past three seasons, I seem to have failed to inventory most of our front yard shrubs.  I've posted photos of the buds on some of our hydrangeas , but have skipped over the rest.  Over the course of the next few days, I'm attempting to put down some entries here so I can reference them in the coming seasons.  First up is this Little Henry Sweetspire.  It sits in a little bed right beside our front walk adjacent to our driveway. We had it put in by Green Grass as part of our initial landscape plan and haven't thought much about it over the past few years.  There were three small plants here when we started and now you can see that it has grown and matured into a nice sized shrub.  It has some long, leggy shoots that have emerged this season as well as some underground shoots that seem to be more rhizome-driven. I have read online that we can take one of these rhizome spreaders to create a new plant - and t

This big happy fern is loving things back in the deep shade of our far back yard.  It is now almost in bush form and has doubled year-over-year from what it looked like last year.    I yanked it out of Nat's Sister's lot before she built her new house in Downers last Summer.  It was the middle of the Summer, so there was certainly some transplant stress.   I haven't done much to tend to this fern aside from a couple of what I'll call 'strategic' waterings.   Those were deep waterings of areas during the deep heat of July/August when I started to see things droop and wilt.  This is located behind the yew hedge that I planted earlier this Summer and will (eventually) be in the shadow of some Canadian Hemlock trees that I planted - if they grow! 

I posted this Mason Bee house structure to our fence back in early Spring of 2018 and it was immediately put to use with some of the cavities filled by Summer .  Posting this photo in the Fall of 2019 to mark in the [ garden diary ] that it seems that none of the cavities have been filled/utilized this season.  Early this Spring, I went in and tried to clean out all of the cavities that had previously been occupied in an attempt to make it as insect-friendly as I could.  For whatever reason....I don't think the tubes were used this season.  I've started to wonder if this is something that I can look to create as a Christmas gift for some family members?  There are plenty of plans online - but it is a simple project just with a cedar box with a roof structure, then following some best practices to make the best home for various insects .  My instincts are to go *big* and think multi-insect environment, but I don't think that's actually best for making something th

Above you can see what I've been calling our "Teardown Hydrangea" in its current state in the Fall of 2019.  I've documented this over time here on the blog since "acquisition" to today.  Starting with the beginning, in October of 2017, I dug some plants out of a yard down the street before they were tearing down a house to build .  In that bucket of plants was a hydrangea that looked really ratty.  Dry and unhealthy.  I didn't have much faith that it was going to make it.  And...frankly, I wasn't really certain that it even *was* a hydrangea!  Surprisingly enough, it survived the Winter and came back in Spring of 2018.  By last August, it has grown a bit and even flowered with a handful of blooms .  If you look then, this was the first time that it was showing off any lime-color in the flowers - which helps point me in the direction of the variety.  They're not (at least now) cone-shaped, but more ball-shaped.  I think that might mean that t

Above you'll see the current state of (on the left) our Everlasting Revolution Hydrangea, (middle) our dead Weeping Cedar tree and (on the right) our Tuff Stuff Hydrangea.  This post is the same photo from just over a year ago and you can see some big differences .  Of course, the Cedar tree is dead.  Sure...that's a difference, but this post is about the size and vibrancy of the hydrangeas on either side. First, the smaller one:  the Everlasting Revolution.  Planted in Fall of 2017 , this marks two years.  It is billed as being 'multi-colored' in flowers , so this is the one I was/am most excited about.  It is about 1/3rd of the size of the other one - planted at the same time, so it has fallen behind for one reason or another.  Here (below) is a closer-up photo of the Everlasting Hydrangea.  It has never flowered or bloomed.   But it has come back both Springs and looking at this photo from a year ago , it has more than doubled this season.  Next year will be t

The last time I posted photos of the pair of Disneyland Roses on the side of our house was right in the middle of the hot Summer in early July of this year .  At that time, I remarked at the time that one of them was much larger than the other - with the one being planted towards the front of the house/porch being smaller and without blooms .   Today, you can see a photo collage at the top of the post showing what these things look like come late September.  I've posted the individual photos below as a way to look back at them in larger format.   Planted in October of 2018 , these are growing at two very different speeds/pace. The first Disneyland Rose is the larger one - and it was larger in July, too.  When I planted it, this one had a small bloom on it .  Today, it is multi-stemmed and gaining some height and spread.  The blooms are big and bright.  The other one is smaller.  Just like it was at planting AND in July .  But it, too, is blooming.  So, tha

All the way back in Spring of 2018, I planted a couple of ferns on the northside of our screened porch - in a spot that is in (I think) total shade all day long.  It felt like the right spot for ferns and hostas - at least as a temporary measure until I figure out the path/pavers that will run alongside the little bed.  One of them was an Autumn Fern.  The other is this Japanese Painted Fern.  Last September - almost exactly a year ago today - I posted a photo of this fern that was trying to establish itself after a rough Summer .  It was showing just.a.little.bit of growth then, but I was hopeful that this fern was going to make it.  The photo at the top of this post is from this week - and you can see that this Japanese Painted Fern has really come back and is spreading itself out in a big way.  I had a Japanese Painted Fern back in Elmhurst - that came back for a few years (when it wasn't smothered by mulch!) - so this isn't my first one of these varieties that ha

At the beginning of the season this year, I planted three small Gold Cone Juniper shrubs .  And they took off with the wet Spring and put on a great show .  After reading all about these particular juniper shrubs, I decided to 'wire them up' to ensure that they don't suffer from splaying based on snow fall in the Winter.  By June, I had wired them up and they looked great .  Then, we hit the hot part of Summer with July and August.  And the shrubs are showing signs of stress.  I'm posting this photo in the [ garden diary ] here on the blog to show the emerging brown spots on some of the shrub.  It is on the 'backside' mostly, so I'm wondering if it is both water/drought-related, but perhaps also sun-related?  The backside gets less sun than the front.  I also wonder if the 'wiring up' caused some of the stress?    I've done this dance before in the Fall - are the trees/shrubs that are showing signs of stress going to make it through the Wi