Why I Oughta...

Most everything perennial in our backyard garden has gone to sleep for the season.  But there's some new(er) things that are seeing their first Winter season in our yard that are showing a little bit of contrast.  Below is a photo that shows an inter-planted set of Twinkle Toes Pulmonaria and Blue Champion Primrose.  The Primrose went in the beds in VERY EARLY Spring 2023 and this is the first Winter:  The foliage difference is pretty striking;  the Pulmonaria is mostly brown, wilting and dead.  The Primrose?  Green and seemingly evergreen.   A new (to me) nice little study in winter foliage. Here's a post from a little bit over a year ago showing these same Pulmonaria without the Blue Champion Primrose .   Also... note the leaf litter.  Those Northern Red Oak leaves sure don't break down easily.  

During the past week or so, I've been poking around doing research into evergreens for this year and think about shrubs and trees that might work in certain spots of our garden.  While I was doing that, I thought that I should do some level of an informal audit on what is in place.  Of course, there are the Hicks yews (in multiple places), but also a couple of Junipers and just last year, I added a Bird's Nest Spruce that I left in the nursery container .   But, when I went out in the yard to have a look at what else there was, I realized that I planted another conifer that I failed to document in the [ garden diary ] this past fall:  a Mugo Pine.  When I was planting some of those tiny Boxwoods , I also dug in a very small Mugo Pine.  While I failed to post about the small Pine going in, I *did* mention it during my 2021 scorecard post .  While that's just fine, I do think this small conifer shrub deserves a post of its own.   What is a Mugo Pine?  From Monrovia : A popula

Posting a couple of photos in the [ garden diary ] to start the new year to mark where I've spread out some of our hardwood ash in the beds in the backyard.  The two photos below in this post show the thin layer that I've scattered on top of the snow in the south bed in the backyard from the Oakleaf Hydrangeas to the newly planted Hicks Yews .  I've done this in the past (bringing out the wood ash from our fireplaces) and scattered it around the yard.  In 2019, I applied a thin layer to the base of our Frans Fontaine Columnar Hormbeam trees . This year, I had a bucket-and-a-half and chose the south beds to amend the soil over there.  Currently, it looks a little strange.  Grey patches on top of pure white snow.  But, once we get a melt/thaw then freeze cycle - or...another snowfall, I'm thinking this stuff will disappear from view. The word on the Web is mixed in regards to adding ash to the garden, yard and compost bins.  It seems that in a limited way, there's no