Why I Oughta...

The tree that you see in the middle/right of this photo (the one with a singular trunk that splits into two about two feet from the ground) is a Buckthorn.  This particular Buckthorn is located a short distance away from the "far southwest corner" that I showed in our landscape plan earlier this year.   (You'll note that there's another Buckthorn that is shown in that post and marked for removal.) And a quick look at the listing from the Morton Arboretum tells you all you need to know about the tree: I had a few Buckthorns identified by our landscaper and landscape designer and marked for removal, but with the temps cooling off, I figured it was finally time to get back there and take a look at them and see what I could do myself.  I found a couple of small ones and then used the Google machine to quickly identify that I was, indeed, dealing with Buckthorn. A look at the leaves - not to mention the broad, yet pointy thorns on the main part of the tree - m

On the left, you can see the tiny Everlasting Revolution Hydrangea plant that I put in last fall.  I showed an early Summer view of this thing when it was barely poking out of the mulch .  This one has always been smaller and a bit behind the other one. That one on the right is the Tuff Stuff Red Hydrangea that went in on the same day .  I posted an early June photo of this one, too here on the blog .  You can see the difference in these two, but also, if you look back at those posts I linked above, you can get a sense for how these have grown over the past two months.  Also, in the middle of this photo is my Weeping Cedar .  I planted this tree in May and it seems to have established itself a bit and hasn't experienced any needle drop like, ahem, other trees.  I cut off the top of the tree in this photo, but you can get a sense for the limbs that it has added and how it appears to have bulked up a bit.  Back to the hydrangeas, though.  You'll note that NEITHER of

Back in June, I planted two kinds of pumpkin seeds in the far reaches of our backyard from the packages you see above:  Big Moon and First Prize Hybrid.  I seem to have failed to post about the seeds or seedlings to date in the [ garden dairy ].  But, today, that changes.   For the past week or two, I've noticed A LOT of flowers and quite a bit of bee activity.  Like they were drunk on pollen after hanging out in the various yellow flowers that these vines have put out.  Turns out...they were busy bees.  (get it?!?) It seems that our pumpkin vines have started to fruit.  Here's a look at the tiniest of pumpkins that you've ever seen: I don't know which of the two varieties this one is.  But, the more pressing matter is the race against the clock.  We have just a month and a half until this thing needs to be on our front porch.  Will it get there in time?  I have these pumpkin pedestals on hand that I hope to put into place as this (and others) grow i

One evening recently when I came home, the kids excitedly came up to me and couldn't contain their excitement about finding something in the backyard.  It was this bird's nest.  They found it in the middle of the grass, so it seems like it fell out of a tree.  There weren't any signs of this being inhabited - no shells or parts of shells - so I'm not sure if it is from this season or just a remnant of another season that was used by a bird family.  I scooped it up with a shovel and put it on this little side table.  The Bird - our middle child - was the most interested in it and we talked about building a nesting box/platform out of wood that we can hang in the yard.  Maybe we can place this on there and see if someone would use it?  Or maybe just encourage another family to inhabit it next season?  Based on a quick Google search, we're assuming that this is a Robin's nest .  And this page makes it seem like 're-use' of a nest happens, so if we put

Last October, I posted a photo of a trug of perennials that I dug out of a lot down the block ahead of their teardown and new build.  In that post , I mentioned that I *thought* that I had grabbed a hydrangea, but it was looking pretty dried out and rough.  And wasn't sure it was going to come back.  In that same batch, I grabbed some hostas and ferns.  Here's a post that I shared of the ferns that came back .  And here's the hostas .  Now, I have the final piece of the good-news puzzle:  what you see above is a healthy, flowering hydrangea that is emerging for it's first season in our yard.  I'm posting this here so I can reference it in the [ garden diary ] in the future.  This particular hydrangea has chartreuse-colored blooms and while short in stature is doing quite well without a lot of attention being paid to it during the hot Summer.  As it continues to put down it's roots this season, I'm expecting to have it get larger next season and f

Back in May, we planted seven Frans Fontaine European Hornbeam 2.5" caliper trees along the north fenceline of our property  in an area that is right outside of our screened porch.  We selected these trees due to their narrow habit and how they will (eventually) grow into a screen in a narrow area.  Due to the investment in these trees, I've been pretty careful to baby them with water and to try to make sure they establish themselves this season.  Having been planted in May, we have the full Summer to have them put down roots to ensure they come back next Spring.  I've been using a soaker hose and watering them about once or twice per week at about an hour per watering on a low setting.  These were planted down in a low spot, so they're also the benefactor of whatever natural water that occurs on the property as it flows downhill.  On the flipside, they're sitting right on top of a drainage pipe and there's a grate right in the middle of these things that

It is not all gardening wins for me this Summer.  Sometimes the losses are just as important. I celebrated the planting of this small Fraser Fir in our backyard just 10 weeks ago at the beginning of June.  It was in a good spot in the yard that had plenty of water and it was taking off.  There was a run of new, soft growth that came on the tree in July, then all of a sudden, it started to go brown.  From the top down.  Now, two weeks after I noticed the first bit of brown, the whole thing is gone.  Sad stuff. Not sure if it was water.  Or location.  Or something else like a disease.  It went really fast.  And the shot of new growth followed directly by the brown-out makes me wonder if it was disease-related? This was the 22nd tree that we had planted in our backyard as part of the reforestation process and the second evergreen.  We've added a Hemlock since, though.  I bought this one at Home Depot who has a 1 year warranty, so I'll have to dig this thing up and bring

I recently added this Songbird Essentials Bungee Cord Squirrel Feeder to our backyard at Hornbeam Hill.  Those of you who have been reading for a while know that we have a set of bird feeders that we've set up close to our kitchen windows including a fly-thru feeder that continues to get raided by various critters.  Also, last year, I put out a Christmas-themed seed bell to only have it absconded with by someone within a few days . As part of the program to become a " Certified Wildlife Habitat ", we have to continue to provide food via feeders, so this also continues to check that box for us. I put this bungee cord feeder on a shepherd's hook attached to the top of our fence so the corn cob is dangling about three and a half feet from the ground (too high to reach from the ground) and about 15 inches from the fence (almost too far to reach from the fence).    I'm hoping that by putting a squirrel-specific feeder over on this side of the yard, they'l

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

Source image from here .  Not my photo. A few weeks back, we were at one of our neighbor's house for a get-together and we spent the entire afternoon out in their backyard where they have quite a large perennial garden.  I wanted to get a little closer look, so I wandered out there and discovered not only a native-looking perennial garden, but also a series of walking paths *in* the garden.  The image above is NOT their garden, but rather just some example image that I found online ( source here ). The garden I was walking in (with the paths) was in full sun, so it was quite different than the one you see above, but I picked that image because it is a shade garden and more of what we have to deal with on Hornbeam Hill.  Hostas and ferns and hostas and ferns. The path idea really struck me and made me think about our own landscape plan.  I've showed a bunch of cuts/selects of our landscape plan here on the blog , but none of them had a 'walking path'.  It wasn

Back in March, I shared a photo of a set of Night Queen Dahlia tubers that I picked up and planned to put in a container this Spring.  This year, I planted two different varieties of Dahlias including these Firebird Semi Cactus Dahlias that I've shared an update on in early June.   Above you see a photo of the blooms from the Night Queen variety that I took this week.  There are about a dozen or so blooms that have sprung up - some on strong stems - others on thin stems that can't quite handle the weight of these colorful blooms. I posted this same photo earlier this week on my backyard/garden Instagram handle @HornbeamHill . Night queen Dahlia's in bloom. #containergardening A post shared by Hornbeam Hill (@hornbeamhill) on Jul 23, 2018 at 6:36am PDT Nat thinks that we need to have these dahlias in the ground, not in pots next year and that might be right, but I do like having them grace our patio with their beauty, not to mention that our patio ge

All the way back in April, I was given a Chicago-Hardy Fig Tree for my birthday by my sister Vic and Equation Boy/Man.  I somehow, failed to post about the tree all the way until I did this recent patio planter/container round up earlier this month .  In that post, I showed the first look at the Chicago-hardy fig tree that is in a yellow container . Today, you can see in the photo above the first fig that is coming to fruit.  There are three or four of these figs that are starting to grow, so maybe come late Summer, we'll have a little fig harvest. As the name implies, this fig tree is cold hardy for our zone.  The full description is here .  With this being in a container, I'm thinking that I can move it to the garage or screened porch to provide it a little bit of winter cover with the hope that it comes back to life next Spring after living through the hard frost.  Since this is in a container, I'm not counting it in the list of trees planted at Hornbeam Hill.  Th

Back at the beginning of May, I posted about how I was trying some elephant ear bulbs in our containers this season after picking up a pack of nine of them .  Above, is one of my wine barrel containers that I have out on the back patio with - as you can see - some very happy Elephant Ears.  You can also see the wine barrel trellis that I embedded in the wine barrel with a first-year clematis vine growing up the back.  (I'll try to post about the trellis in a different post.  I have two of them that are both hosting first-year plants that, I *hope* will come on strong next year and we'll be able to use the trellises as screening material in a meaningful way.) I have to say that I *LOVE* these elephant ears and the real tropical feel they lend to our pots.  I now have them in a few - including the Black Magic variety I planted with some Dahlias - and I know that I'll do them again next year.  I believe there is likely some way to salvage and reuse the bulbs each season,

Back in June of this year, I posted about the two fingerling varieties of potatoes that I planted in containers .  I've kept them in one of the most full-sun spots in our backyard, right outside of our kitchen windows.  And they shot up.  I 'hill'd them up' as best as I could, but pretty soon, I ran out of container height.  (Lesson learned...plant them in super tall containers and plant them low, so they can get 'hill'd up' quite a bit. This week, I saw these flower blooms emerging and thought that they're quite striking.  In fact, that's the exact phrase I used in my Instagram post from earlier this week.  Striking. (on yeah... that's my gardening-focused Insta handle.   That, much like this blog, is intended as a diary of sorts.) Potato blossoms. We're growing fingerlings in containers this season. The blooms are quite striking. A post shared by Hornbeam Hill (@hornbeamhill) on Jul 2, 2018 at 7:16am PDT I posted

Last year, in May of 2017, I first posted about the Dawn Redwood that we had bought on a whim from Menards.  It was destined to go into our backyard in Downers Grove and we ended up planting it on Earth Day with some help from the three kids .  I love this photo that Nat took of us and was reminded of it recently when my Mother-in-Law made me a framed version for my desk.  Almost one year ago exactly - on July 6th - I posted a 'two month-in update' of the tree that showed it green and mostly happy . Everything looked good.  But, we had just moved in and the backyard wasn't a priority.  And my watering - it appears - seemed to drop off.  Because we lost the tree.  At least, I know that now. Up until October of last fall, I wasn't sure.  I posted this piece asking if the Dawn Redwood was going to make it .  It had set some buds, but it wasn't looking good. I will admit that I limb'd up the redwood in an attempt to get it to focus on some of it's uppe

We have a neighbor down the block that spends a lot of time and effort to tend to his yard and garden.  He's out there constantly and seems to really like to make his yard look the best it can.  On one of my walks with Lizzie, I chatted him up about the garden and we got started talking about how he was about to split up his Daylilies.  And he offered us a few of them.  Of course, I'd take them, I said.  What you see above are a few containers that we ended up with before I put them in one of the beds in the rear part of our yard.  I don't know that much about daylilies, but we had three of them in our old garden that I placed at the foot of our Ginko Tree in the backyard .  We don't have daylilies in our landscape plan, so I've been torn about where to put them.  Seems like a little bit of 'longer-term' hosting is best.  According to the donor, these seem to tolerate some shade, so I'm putting them in an area that we aren't planning on dealin

Along the north fence line, about mid-way back in our yard, we have a couple of youngish trees that are 2" to 3" caliper trees about 15 to 20 feet tall.  After looking at their leaves, I went around to the rest of the yard to try to identify if I had more than these two.  As you can see above, the leaves are quite jagged along the edges and they are alternate, not compound.  Meaning, the leaves are not exact opposites of each other, but go one on one side, then the other side, then back to the first side, etc. I tried a few leaf identifying apps and even Google Lense and they gave what I though was questionable results:  they identified it as an Ash Tree.  The issue?  Ash Trees have compound branching .  Also, my parents lost dozens of Ash trees to the Borer over the past decade, so I was surprised to think that I had two Ash trees that had survived.    I wanted to figure out what I was dealing with, so after the web gave me mixed results, I remembered what I did whe

Back at the end of May, I entered a River Birch tree in our backyard into my [ Garden Diary ].  It was a tree that we inherited, but I wanted to document it during the Summer of 2018, so I have something to revisit as it grows over time.   Today, I'm entering another tree:  a mighty Oak tree that is the inherited tree that is closest to our patio.  You can see it above in a photo that I took recently as the canopy continues to leaf out. This is one of two really large Oaks that we have inside the fence line.  The other is the 'tree house' candidate that I posted about earlier this Spring . This Oak (above) is the tree that we have hung our tree swing on and you can see the ropes coming down from it in the photo. This tree was one of a few that were in a row when we bought the property, but due to the drainage requirements - we had to build an underground pit out back and swale our land towards it - we had to remove a few of the other trees.  None of them were th

I came across this Lemon Coral Sedum from Proven Winners in this video from Garden Answer.  I really liked the way it looked in her video, so when I came across it (at the garden center at the Jewel of all places), I had to bring it home.  I put it in a few spots including this wine barrel planter that we have set on our patio.  Like a lot of other sedums, it is drought tolerant, but this one has a neat chartreuse-y color along with those pretty yellow flowers.  I planted this one and it immediately began to establish itself, stretch out and put on this show.  Tucked right in next to the Night Sky Petunia that continues to bloom all Summer long, this part of the pot is doing exactly what I was hoping for in this spot.  The only *miss* in this pot is any sort of mid-level structure/height, but it is getting close to time to rip out those Pansies and replace them with something more fit for the heat of Summer.  Opportunity, right??? This wine barrel container (for now) is on the no

This is the third in the series of posts updating some plants that Nat's Mom gifted us late last fall.  Yesterday, I posted about the Tuff Stuff Red Hydrangea that is doing really well .   Today, I'm sharing the photo you see above to show the current state of the Everlasting Revolution hydrangea that isn't doing *as well*.  You can see that it is much smaller than the Tuff Stuff and the foliage is barely emerging from the mulch.  In fact, I had to kind of carve out a little hole/trench for this thing to even have a chance.  It is located about eight feet from the Tuff Stuff variety, so they're getting basically the same support - sun, water, soil.  But the difference is stark.  I've actually babied this one a bit more this late Spring and hope that it continues to establish itself a bit so we head into the Winter with a strong base/root system. I'll try to revisit this plant later this Summer/Fall to see how it has grown when the heat of the Summer hits Do