Why I Oughta...

2025 is the year of the massive hydrangea flop in our garden.  All of our hydrangeas (panicle ones) are flopping more significantly than they've ever flopped before.  Historically, the Vanilla Strawberry Panicle hydrangea out front of our porch 'flop' most years.  But, I can string them up and keep them (mostly) off the boxwoods.   The Limelight Hydrangeas on the side of our house have NEVER flopped.  But, this year?  Big time floppers. And, even weirder...the Little Lime (dwarf) hydrangeas in our backyard ?  They're FLOPPING this year, too.  See below for a look at the Little Lime hydrangeas flopping over with big flower heads: I'm not sure what the reason is for this:  a wet spring?  A colder Spring?  Something happened to create more leggy (and less supportive) stems so much so that EVERY HYDRANGEA (not Oakleaf) is flopping this season.  

A couple weeks ago, I read this post on Martha Stewart's blog titled: Staking the Herbaceous Peonies - and realized that we're coming up quickly on peony season in our garden.  Martha uses (of course she does) stakes that she designed herself and has a huge number of peonies on her property.  We, well...don't.   Over the years, we've ended up with five peony plants.  Two in front (IB2DWs) and three in the back (Kitchen curved bed).  After the first five-or-six years in our new garden, we finally had our first *real* peony season back in 2023 .  Why did we finally get blooms?  Because I moved the peony plants we had on-hand from the back of the yard to closer to the sun/patio.  And, I moved a couple up to the front yard where they get full sun.  Last year (2024), we had even more peonies.  Here's a post showing a full vase of Sarah Bernhardt pink peonies that I cut from one of the plants .   However, due to their small-siz...

You just brought home that awesome pot of Mums from Costco (or the pumpkin patch that you went to this past weekend) and put them up by the front door along with some of your pumpkins and gourds.   You're worried about killing them by forgetting to water them - that's very valid.  But, there's another problem you're about to face:  flopping, open-crowned mums.    Some call this 'falling over' and unless you have a number of your mums tucked-in tightly together in a cluster, your mums are going to 'fall over' or flop.   How do you avoid it?  By using a piece of string or twin or wire to tie them up and keep them held together at the top.  I wrote about this pro-tip back in 2017 - when I encouraged everyone to take a piece of string around the foliage and stems of their mums and tie them together .  I've been doing it ever since. This year, we went with a monochromatic nursery container of maroon or dark red mums.  I used a piec...