Why I Oughta...

Conifers Should Come First.  Or, if not first, one should attempt to make up for lost time when you can.  This is the second dwarf conifer tree and third dwarf conifer overall that I've planted in the past week.  All of which are IB2DWs.   Like the Baby Blue Spruce trees that I bought at 50% off, I bought a pair of Weeping Norway Spruce trees.  This post is about the one that is going in our established IB2DWs bed. Below are a few photos showing the pre-planting details: This came as a ball-and-burlap tree from the orange big box store.  I've had these before, but I've always removed as much of the burlap as possible.  This time, I'm going the opposite way.  All I did was cut and remove the twine, but left the burlap in place.  I'm *pretty sure* that these might be air layered trees as whenever I remove the burlap form them, the root system is pretty sparse.   I stuck this tree right in front of the All Gold grasses about half-way back in the bed.  I'm planning

Conifers Should Come First .  That's a gardening truth.  And, as I admitted last week...a mistake that I've made in our garden .  But, it also points to an opportunity.  Specifically in the IB2DWs extended bed.  I talked about focusing on adding some dwarf conifers in service of my #2 item - adding clustered evergreens - IB2DWs extended .     As part of my #Fall Planting for 2023, I kind of went ham on dwarf conifers to make up for my past mistakes.  I've sworn off the trees at Home Depot, but when I was confronted with this sign (below), I decided to nose around.   I found that pallet of blue spruce trees (at the top of this post) that had these tags:  Baby Blue Spruce #7 Container Grown.  See below for the tag showing the $45 price: Half-off means for $22.50, I get a dwarf, blue conifer.  And, it is container-grown, so I'm pretty sure that means it isn't one of their air-layered conifers that come in burlap bags.  I needed this tree.  In fact...I decided that I ne

Earlier this year (May), I planted a pair of dwarf Ginkgo trees - Spring Grove Ginkgos - on either side of our back stoop .  I was planning on planting *something new* here, but I didn't plan on these - rather, I just came across them and decided to go this route.    I posted about them one-month-post-planting and they seemed to be doing well and getting established .  But...I knew the hard, hot, dry part of the Summer was coming and I wanted to be sure these dwarf trees were set up to succeed.  We were gone for a large part of the Summer, so I decided to set up a some timed irrigation and then covered these in shade cloth.  Yeah...I covered them for months at a time to keep them from drying out and burning.  I recently took the shade cloths off - thinking the heat of the Summer is behind us.  What happened under the shade cloth was quite A LOT of new growth.  But, that new growth was *very* tender because it was being protected from the sun.  When I first took the shade cloth off

One of the things that I had on my 2021 to-do list (#25) was to 'buy a conifer of meaning' .  I feel like I *did that* when I planted the Weeping Nootka Falsecypress that I bought this Spring from Wannemakers.  That was the 55th tree planted in total since we bought the lot and the third of this year.  And after cleaning up the full list this Spring , I had 34 alive.    We then added this Emperor 1 Japanese Maple - bringing total to 56 total, 35 alive.  Fourth tree for the 2021 season. Since then, I planted two Harvest Gold Hargozam crabapple trees as replacements in our Belgian Fence espalier - but I didn't include them in the 'official count'.  So, I'm doing that now.  58 total, 37 alive, six trees for the 2021 season. Which brings me to the tree in this post #59 total, 38 'alive' and seventh tree of the 2021 growing season:  another conifer 'of meaning'.  A dwarf Japanese White Pine.   I've been thinking/dreaming/watching/considering a

My mother always had a dwarf Alberta Spruce in our landscape.  Despite being a shade gardener, I have a memory of her having one of these shrubs/trees in the front yard when I was growing up.  I also remember that my Busia had a couple of these, too. And, that's why I put one in a couple of years ago.  I planted this tree (is it really a tree??) back in late Spring 2018  and it seemed to do well right away.  It put on some new growth in year one and year two.  This year, it was humming along.  But, suddenly, it now looks like this below.  It is in decline:  Back at the beginning of the month, I posted a photo and details of a trio of Twinkle Toes Lungwort that I planted at the base of the Dwarf Alberta Spruce .  In that post , I made mention of the stress this tree was under then.  In the photo above in this post, you can see both the Spruce, but you can also see all three of the Lungwort. At this point, I'm not hopeful.  Needle loss in October isn't a good sign. I lost a

My 2020 to-do list for the yard included this item in #8:  "Find cheap fruit trees (that include pollinators) and plant a Belgian Fence (somewhere)."  Welp, I found eight apple trees at the same Home Depot tree sale last week and brought them home to start a Belgian Fence.  Here's a look at some of them below. I have documented the Belgian Fences that we came across in Disneyland over the years.  Here's the first one that caught my attention on a trip .  And here's another from a different trip . I ended up picking apple trees for this because they had the right amount of them and had a variety that I was most keen to get:  Honeycrisp.  One of the things that I've picked up while researching the Belgian Fence was to learn that it is best to select two varieties of apple trees that are 'pollinators'.  In a look at the list for Honeycrisp apples , one of the selected pollinators is Yellow/Golden Delicious.  They are cross-pollinators