Why I Oughta...

Last year, I planted ten tiny bare root strawberry plants in containers and placed the two containers outside of our kitchen windows.  I didn't end up getting any fruit and when looking at the containers at the end of the year, it seemed that they were mostly dead and weren't going to come back this Spring.  I took them off to the compost bin earlier this Spring and moved on. But this past weekend, Nat asked me if I could move a strawberry plant that was growing in and around some ornamental grasses.  What strawberry plant, I asked?  And she pointed me to this one.  Turns out, we have a volunteer Strawberry plant that is coming up and flowering.  What a nice surprise, right?  I *do* need to move this, but I'm thinking I should wait for it to go through one season of throwing off whatever tiny berries it might throw off this season, then move it.  This post says to wait until August : If you already have an established bed, you should gen...

I've written about the pair of Greenspire Linden trees that we have in our backyard that I espalier'd in the late Summer of 2017, right after we moved in a few times here on the blog - with the most recent being in May of last year where I showed the tree's buds about to burst open to life .  Here's a post from September of 2017 that I showed the espalier system that I used (wires and posts) and why I chose to put them a little bit further away from the fence than one would normally. Those two espalier'd trees are done in what is known as the "cordon" style.  Or, maybe, a "Double Cordon" or "Triple Cordon" because we have (currently) four rows of branches. Cordon is just one of the styles that are popular with the others being Candelabra and something called the "Belgian Fence". Here's a breakdown of some of the most common versions of espalier from "State by State Gardening" below.  Link to the imag...

Back at the end of June, I posted a photo of the bounty that we took out of a yard in Downers Grove ahead of their teardown  that someone we're close to was undertaking.  (We didn't just glom on to the plants!  We were invited!)  Along with the hostas and peonoies and irises, I also grabbed a ratty-looking Raspberry plant.  Or at least, I was pretty sure it *was* a Raspberry plant.  I stuck it in the back of our property and promptly forgot about it.  Fast forward to this week and here's two different evening harvests.  Not a ton of berries, but after the transplant shock, I'm surprised we got any at all.  Not to mention getting scarfed up by the critters that run through our yard on a regular basis.  There are a few dozen more emerging/white-ish berries that will ripen soon, too.  So we'll be at it for a while it seems.  But, with just one plant, we'll never be in a position to fill pint after pint like some folks. Li...