Why I Oughta...

One of the traditions that I've enjoyed keeping up with each year with our kids is the annual Earth Day planting of a tree in our yard.  We started with one - a Dawn Redwood in 2017 - that we planted in our new lot while our house was being built.  This was a few months before the construction was going to be done.   The next year - 2018 - we planted three Earth Day trees. One for each kid.  We did a weeping cherry (that we lost), a Red Maple Sun Valley tree that we planted all the way in the back and a flowering pear tree that we planted on the south fence line .  Those two have survived since then, but they were VERY small trees.  I wasn't measuring them at the time, but when I measured them in January of this year (which would have made these 1.75 years *in the ground* at our house), the maple was just .87" caliper and the Chanticleer Pear was up to 1.20".   They were similar when we put them in, so guess it was something like .65" or .70" when p

Yesterday, I posted some photos of the buds on our front-yard Saucer Magnolia here on the blog and talked about how it appears to be quite happy and ready to put on a show once the weather warms up.  Today, I'm sharing a photo of a tree that tells a different story.  A, what I believe is going to turn out to be, a not-so-happy story.  That tree, above, is one of the Chanticleer Pear trees that we planted last year.  This one was planted before we moved in by the builder/landscaper.  It is just to the north of our driveway and right outside of our garage door.  It is a big specimen - more than 3" caliper.  And it didn't do well last year.  At all.  Despite it being drenched pretty regularly - both from watering the grass but also by specific tree water-ers, it continued to turn brown and many of the leaves dropped prematurely.  I've posted about these flowering pear trees (Cleveland Pears, Chanticleer Pears, etc) over the years and had a few of them on our lot b