Why I Oughta...

2024 has been the season for dahlias in my garden.  This isn't the first time that I've grown Dahlias from tubers, but it is the first season that I worked at getting them right.  From pre-ordering tubers to starting them indoors to moving them out after the last frost to mulching them in and keeping them watered and fed, I've worked at the dahlias this year and the results - in terms of countertop arrangements - have really paid off .   Like a lot of things in the garden, the first frost will bring most dahlia seasons to their end.   Last week, the National Weather Service was tweeting (or X'ing) about how our area was set to receive a couple of nights of 'hard frosts'.    There were a bunch of tweets said that very thing: "...resulting in an end to the growing season for much of the area."  Like this one: Widespread frost and near to sub-freezing temperatures are expected again tonight away from Chicago and the lakeshore, resulting in an e...

This photo is from Tuesday, April 20th.  When, we had snow.  And two straight nights of below freezing temperatures in Northern Illinois.  I was totally unprepared for these temperatures, but thanks to Nat's quick thinking, we grabbed a couple of sheets of floating row cover from Amazon that had 'Same Day' delivery.  I unrolled them, covered a bunch of things that I've recently moved (the Fanal Astilbes, a bunch of random Peonies, some new ferns and hostas and an impulse-bought Japanese Maple.   You can see the snow coming down in the photo below: I went out the following morning (when the temperature was still below 30 degrees) and found my tulip blooms looking not so happy: I'm guessing that we'll have a much shorter season of tulip flowers this season, but by the afternoon - when the temperatures had risen to the upper 40's, they mostly seemed to bounce back.  Some of the flower petals had dropped, but nothing like what happened with the Saucer Magn...

 Most of our hostas in the backyard are now looking like this one you see below.  It has a blend of seasonal decline (the yellowing) and what I'm pretty sure is frost damage from very early this Spring.   We had a late frost - after these. had emerged and while they didn't show this much damage all year long, based on watching Monty Don's Instagram handle, he mentioned 'frost damage' on his hostas.  Here, below, is one of our hostas underneath the hornbeams in our backyard: And here, below, is Monty Don's post on Instagram talking about frost damage on his hostas: View this post on Instagram The hostas are dying back - but the damage caused by a frost on May 15th only apparent in the past week or so. I have often observed this very delayed effect. A post shared by Monty Don (@themontydon) on Oct 5, 2020 at 12:00am PDT Seems like the same situation, right?  He's calling it a 'delayed effect'.

A couple of weeks ago, I posted some photos of our Ostrich Ferns that had suffered some late-season frost damage .  On a walk around our yard recently, I noticed some strange signs on our front-yard hostas.  You can see one of them above with the whitish tips on parts of this hosta that showed up after that frost event.  The hosta above is the 'middle' one of three up there.  Below is a photo showing all three - in front of the tulips.  This one (below) is the northern-most one on the right: And this one (below) is the southern-most one that has the least amount of frost damage.  This area can use a few more hostas to fill in - as I think the heavy clay soil in this bed has limited the growth/spread of anything that we've planted in here.

A couple of weeks ago, we planted a fast-growing Lombardy Poplar tree in our far backyard and had high hopes that it would provide a little bit of screening in a quick way.  But, today I went by to inspect the tree a little and was surprised to see it was having some trouble.  Look at the photo above to see the leaves that are wilting and browning out.  This is certainly NOT a good sign, but I'm not calling it yet with this tree and I hope it can bounce back.  I'm pretty certain that this was a recently-planted bareroot tree that came in a burlap sack.  This was the first tree that we received in one of those burlap sacks and I decided to NOT plant the sack.  I think that was a mistake.  It *could* be frost damage like what we've seen on some of our ferns , but I'm not sure.  On the next tree - which I'll post about soon, I trimmed the burlap sack down to be pretty small and planted the sack to try to keep the soil around the tree roots a...

Over the weekend, we experienced a mid-May late (and hard) frost.  It has been cold for a few days ( some are calling it a polar vortex ) and it sure doesn't feel like Spring around here right now.  We had ample warning on the frost - the local news was talking it up for a few days - so I sprung into action and tried to cover/protect as much as I could.  Anything that was budding/on the edge of flowering, I tried to protect.  That means the Rhododendrons and Disneyland Roses were covered.  I also covered our new Hellebores (that I seem to have failed to post about) and even attempted to cover *part* of the Japanese cherry blossom tree that was/is mid-bloom . But, I have far too much to cover everything and it seems that I've learned a lesson here:  the newly emerged, unfurled tips of Ostrich Ferns are far too delicate to deal with a hard frost.  See the photo above - these things were hit pretty hard.   This pair of ferns is loc...