Why I Oughta...

For the past few years (planted in 2019), we've had a creeping/crawling Juniper shrub planted in a patio container out back.  I put it in this container and attempted to prune it a little bit and wire it up when I was focused on trying my hand at bonsai .   Two years later (Spring of 2021), I was seeing some wire damage and (for now) abandoned the project .  My thought was....let this thing grow a bit more, then let's revisit it for pruning and shaping as it is more mature.   On a recent walk in the backyard, I came across (or...really...'noticed') this shrub in the container and I was (temporarily) alarmed.  Look at it in the photo below.  It is maroon-ish/green.  Or, I suppose, one could view it as greenish/maroon-ish/brown-ish/grey-ish?  Is that a color? (That is a lot of 'ishes'.) I snapped that photo and then went looking back in the garden diary here.  I found this post from two years ago - December of 2020 .  Good news:...

With the whole 'social distancing' policy being enforced in our household, I had some time to putter around the yard this weekend.  One of the things that drew my attention was the sad state of these Gold Cone Junipers.  You can see one of them in the photo at the top of this post.  I bought three of these from Menards on April 6, 2019.  I have the receipt in my little file that shows the purchase date AND the 1 Year guarantee tag on them that you can see in the two photos below.  One note that might be useful for you:  Everytime I buy a tree or a shrub that has a 1 year guarantee, I do 2 things:  I staple one of the plant tags to the receipt and file it away in an envelope.  I also then add it to my Google calendar - one week short of a year.  That means...I bought this on April 6, 2019, I put an entry for these Gold Cone Junipers on March 30th, 2020. According to the garden diary, I had them on hand by April 22nd and ended up ...