Why I Oughta...

Back at the end of February, I published my 25 point "to do" list for the yard and garden for 2021 .  In that list, I included what I called two "priority areas" as #1 and #2.  The item in spot #3 was to work the area between the two driveways. The first two priority areas are in the backyard, but this one is in the front yard and I didn't label it as a priority area before I published the list, so I'm not sure I can now.  Instead, let's just call this"Between Two Driveways".    I mentioned it yesterday as a potential location for some transplanted peonies. This is a long, narrow strip that was - up until last fall - just turf with a very small Bald Cypress and a troubled Chanticleer Pear tree .  Our neighbors directly to the north of us have recently built their new house and moved in this past Fall.  As part of their new construction, they added a new driveway that runs parallel to ours - thus creating this long strip of land.  The Bald Cypr

I normally don't mind shoveling our driveway, front walk and sidewalk that much.  We don't have a ton of square footage to do and I find the shoveling to be somewhat therapeutic - especially this season as I' not getting out of the house too much.  I *had* a snowblower, but sold it on Craigslist because I found that I wasn't using it, it was getting old and cranky and it took up A LOT of space in the garage.   I use a wide shovel from Menards that I bought last season and I've found that good shovels have a life of a couple of seasons before I want to replace it.  Usually the metal edge gives away.   But this year?  We've had A LOT of snow.  In the past month, we've had A LOT of snow.  And that means a lot of shoveling.  And I'm kinda getting tired of it.   It is becoming hard to find spots to put the snow now and our driveway is probably six or seven feet narrower than it is normally because I stopped clearing to the edges.  I wanted to mark the snow si

Yesterday,  I posted about the purchase of a Red Fox Katsura tree from the Morton Arboretum Fall Plant Sale and talked about how it has a columnar habit and purple-ish leaves that turn green as they mature.  This is the 52nd tree that I've now planted on our property and the 17th of the year - matching the high-water mark of 2018 when I planted 17 trees, too.   This tree is VERY thin.  Like, VERY thin.  I was told it is a two-year old tree and has very little limb activity going on.  The top of it is so tall and thin that it is now drooping over in what you would think was a weeping habit.    Here, below, is a photo showing the tree with the top weeping over and the one branch that exists.  I dug a nice hole, removed the clay with the post-hole-digger and heavily amended the soil with composted manure.  I need to buy some bamboo and straighten out the top.   Below is the tag that shows the height (40-60') and spread (25-40').   I mentioned that I planted this as an "u

Documenting here, in the [garden diary] our front yard cast iron urn that I've planted the past few years.  I bought it off of Craigslist from a lady in LaGrange in the Spring of 2018 and we've kept it adjacent to our driveway ever since.  I'm not sure it is the best location, but for a variety of reasons, it has stayed put.  One change this year:  it is now sitting on top of a larger, square paver to give it a proper base. Here's what we had in the urn last year - which was a bit more colorful. This year, there are three plants in the container - with two of them being replicated from our backyard container that is based on a color pattern we saw in Paris at Luxembourg Gardens . This has a larger Blue Salvia (Salvia farinacea), in front a red Wave petunia, and tucked into the upper left is a small Foxtail Fern.  We've had Foxtail Ferns in containers the past few years and have had mixed results - depending on how tightly we've packed them into the

Spring and early Summer has treated our Karl Foerster Feather Reed Grasses that are sandwiched between our front walk and driveway really well.  There are three of them planted in this little bed that I mulched earlier this Summer with some cocoa bean shell mulch.  They're all happy and putting on a little lacy show right now.  I've posted photos of these grasses over the years.  They were planted when we moved in back in Summer of 2017.  And here's a look at them their FIRST year back - in early June of 2018 .   By August of 2018, they had finished growing and were transitioned to golden tops/tips .  The last time, I posted a photo of these were last October (2019) when they were on their way to dormancy for the year.  In the photo at the top of this post, you can see them right now - happy and green.  With a lot of top growth that is lightweight and moves with the wind.  Here - below - is a close-up view of those tips.  They are really striking RIGHT now. 

Recently, we had twelve steaming yards of hardwood fines mulch delivered to our driveway from Best Firewood and Mulch - the same folks who deliver our firewood.  That's the delivery in the video at the top of this post showing the driver doing a little bit of 'jiggling' with his lifted bed to get all of the mulch to drop.  Nine years ago, I posted a similar video of ten yards of mulch that was dropped on our old driveway.  You can watch that video here .  This new mulch is destined for the beds that I pointed out in my recent garden tour post  and will fill in the spots between the front (where we're doing the cocoa bean hull mulch) and the far back (where I've been doing the wood chips from the Villag e). I have a seven cubic yard cart (wheelbarrow...but not a traditional wheelbarrow).  There are 27 cubic feet in a yard.  Let's figure that it takes four carts to get that yard.  Twelve x four per yard = 48 carts lugged into the back and side yard.  Ther

This troubled tree - in our front yard - appears to finally have overcome transplant shock and a clay bowl to get back on schedule.  At least....that's my hope.  You can see the flower buds that are set to explode in the photo above.  This is the second tree in this location after the first one that was installed when we built the house died.  This one , too, would have died if I didn't intervene.  I'm pretty sure that digging out a little channel that broke up the clay bowl underneath this tree is what saved it from drowning itself. The last time I posted about this pear tree was last Summer when it was leaf'ing out .  It didn't look super healthy and robust, but was green.  I trimmed many of the dead limbs off, but left everything else that was leaf'ing.  Prior to last year, this thing was all out of cycle.  In November of 2018 - YES!  November... it flowered .  In terms of timing, this flowering pear tree is showing buds about the same size/timing as

In November, I posted about how I had applied a second coat of concrete sealer to our driveway in an attempt to preserve it as best I can .  Part of that preservation is also trying to NOT use rock salt on it to melt ice and snow.  That's a best practice - not using salt - that was shared by our builder, but you can also find it online all over the place.    Some folks call salt the "#1 enemy of concrete" .  So, I try to take care of my driveway without salt or any other melting products.  The issue is that our driveway is on an incline.  You might not be able to tell from this photo , but we're uphill from the street to our driveway. Have you ever come across a concrete driveway that looks like this ?  Pitted and full of pockmarks?  That's very often because of salt damage.  From this story : The pock marks are likely from rock salt deterioration on your concrete drive. It can be caused by using rock salt (sodium chloride) to melt ice on your drive, or c

I posted a [ house maintenance ] post recently talking about how I applied a coat of concrete driveway sealer earlier this Fall as part of just trying to keep up with things around the house.  Back a week or so ago, Nat had to drive the kids to school one morning when it was snowing.  And after she got the van back into the driveway, she sent me this photo showing her - ummm....nonlinear - route up the driveway.  I had recently brought our van in to the tire store and the guy told me that the tires were fine.  They had about half of their life left on the treds.  Yet, she had a tough time getting up our inclined driveway.  So...that has me wondering:  have I made my driveway slicker than it would be without the sealer?  I imagine that it would be the case, right?  I mean...if the water beads up and there's a little bit of a glossy coat on the concrete, isn't it going to be slippery when wet?  I've tried over the past few Winters to use as little salt on the dri

This photo above - of part of our driveway - is a few weeks old, but I wanted to drop this down here on the blog, so I could refer back to it in terms of house maintenance.  When we built the house, the concrete guys laid down a nice thick concrete sealer on top of our brand new driveway.  I subsequently worked earlier this Summer to powerwash the whole thing and put on a first coat of sealer.  That meant that it was about two years old before I put on a second coat. Then, late in October, I found a day that was 'right' in terms of temperature (air temps in the 50's and rising for a few hours, surface temps in the 50's and no rain in the forecast).  So, I quickly grabbed the garden sprayer, filled it with sealer and slopped it on.  I used this SealBest Concrete Sealer from Menards (not the high gloss stuff) that retails for $79.99 for five gallons .  You can see it in varying degrees of absorption with a purple/white-ish hue.  And, as I mentioned above, I used a ha

The last time we checked in on this large caliper Chanticleer Flowering Pear tree that is planted close to our front driveway was last Fall when it was totally off-cycle.  It flowered in early November .  But, I took that (oddly-timed) indicator as a potential sign of progress.  Looking back at this same tree in June of last year, I think that this year the tree is healthier.  It isn't perfect as there are still plenty of thin spots and some dead tips.  But, look at the photo from last year .  The leaves are a different color.   Darker green.  Seemingly more healthy, right? The culprit was the clay bowl that this tree was planted in and how it was drowning the tree.  At least...that's what I *think* was happening.  I dug out part of the tree on the low-side of the planting bowl and then used a post-hole digger to dig through the clay layer to make a kind-of drainage spot so the water had a place to run.  After I did this excavation project, it didn't take long for the

Recently, we made a stop at the Home Depot to pick up some painting supplies for a project and I, as I usually do, wandered out to the garden center.  There....I was confronted with a bunch of small fall-planting-ready trees.  Most of them were fruit trees, but mixed in on the pallets were a few shade trees.  But there was one small tree that caught my eye:  a small (less than 1" caliper) Bald Cypress. Priced at $19, I had a hard time passing it up.  That's it in the photo above and you can see that it is small and...dare I say....scrawny.    But at $19, it isn't all that much different than the Dawn Redwood that I planted as a replacement earlier this Summer . Nat's folks have a couple of Bald Cypresses and there are a few down at Barth Pond (that we use to mark the water level of the pond!) and at Whittier School in our neighborhood.  Each time we walk by them or see them, I remark that I'd like to have one of those trees on Hornbeam Hill. Now?  We have

This gardening season, I planted a number of Karl Foerster Reed Fountain grasses in our backyard along the rear foundation outside both the kitchen and the screened porch.  The weren't the first set of these fountain grasses that we had planted, though.  As part of our 'move-in' landscaping that our builder and landscape team completed before we moved in was the installation of three Karl Foerster Reed Grasses in a small bed that sits between our front walk/stoop and driveway.  The bed is about ten or twelve feet long by about three feet wide.  You can see all three of them in the photo above with their feather reeds showing off for the world to see.  They really look great and seem to be healthy in this spot.  I first posted about these grasses a little bit over two months ago - June of this year - when I posted this photo of the grasses just getting started for the season.  Go check out this post to see how much smaller they were (and so green!).  I called them

These three Karl Forester Reed Grasses were planted by the landscaper by the builder before we moved in.  They're placed in a small bed that is sandwiched between the front stairs on our porch and front walk and our driveway.  I didn't document them last season here on the blog, but due to their location, they didn't have an easy time.  (I *did* document other things in the front like our Vanilla Strawberry Hydrangeas .)  Based on where our hose bib in front is located, our hose ended up living in this area a lot last year and as such these things were trampled/smashed pretty regularly.  That meant that come late Summer/early Fall, they were looking shabby.  I wasn't sure what the Winter would hold, but I crossed my fingers.  Earlier this Spring, I cut back all the winter show and now look at them!  They're doing quite well and have tons of growth.  The same can't be said about the grasses we bought from Costco last fall .  They didn't come back at all,

Yesterday, I posted some photos of the buds on our front-yard Saucer Magnolia here on the blog and talked about how it appears to be quite happy and ready to put on a show once the weather warms up.  Today, I'm sharing a photo of a tree that tells a different story.  A, what I believe is going to turn out to be, a not-so-happy story.  That tree, above, is one of the Chanticleer Pear trees that we planted last year.  This one was planted before we moved in by the builder/landscaper.  It is just to the north of our driveway and right outside of our garage door.  It is a big specimen - more than 3" caliper.  And it didn't do well last year.  At all.  Despite it being drenched pretty regularly - both from watering the grass but also by specific tree water-ers, it continued to turn brown and many of the leaves dropped prematurely.  I've posted about these flowering pear trees (Cleveland Pears, Chanticleer Pears, etc) over the years and had a few of them on our lot b

I was gifted this leaf blower upgrade for Christmas this year and with the thin, light powder that came down this week, it was a perfect time to try blowing the snow away.  No back strain.  No work involved, actually.  Worked really well.  Won't do the trick when the heavy stuff comes down, but for now?  Loved it. 

One morning in the past few weeks, I witnessed this weird event:  a tree in the front yard was shedding all of it's leaves at once.  Check out what seems like a shower of leaves falling.  One right after the other.  You can see from the pattern on the ground that this tree was dropping them all in a matter of minutes while the other trees still are holding on to theirs.  You can also notice that there's frost on the roof across the street from us and I *think* that this might have been the first frost?  Could that have set off this reaction? 

Last check-in on our house was showing the footprint of the patio out back , but things continue to move along both inside and outside.  One of the latest things is the installation of our new driveway.  Above, you see the apron or approach between the driveway and the street being installed by the crew.  We were able to get there while the concrete was setting up and Nat etched out name in the driveway. At our old place, we didn't have much of a driveway.  Our garage was out back off the alley and we had a kind of 'pad' for one car out front.  Thus, shoveling wasn't a big issue.  I'd break out the shovel and spend more time on the sidewalk than on the driveway.  But, just look at this thing!?!   We decided to set the house back an additional 20 feet behind where it had to be (by code) because we wanted to try to save a tree that we would have had to cut down.  But, that created 20 additional feet of driveway that I'm going to have to tend to this winter.