Why I Oughta...

Yesterday, I posted photos of how I'm attempting to overwinter some Dahlia tubers in the ground and in a couple of those pics, you might have peeked at the chicken wire cages next to the piles of mulch on the dahlia tubers.  Those chicken wire cages are full of fallen leaves and are set on top of the three Disneyland Rose crowns along the southside of our house. See below for a couple of photos showing how I set up the ring of chicken wire and filled it with mulched-up leaves: These roses struggled this year, so here's hoping this little bit of extra Winter protection is going to help them get through the cold.

Yesterday, I posted a photo of our Disneyland Roses showing off their last round of bloom s for the year and talked about how nice it is to have some of these colorful flowers this late in the season.  I suppose...it sort-of makes up for the fact that Spring seems to last FOREVER around here and the flowers don't begin to pop-off until August.  2024 has been the season of the dahlia in our garden and it seems that I 've called for 'a lid' on the dahlia season for weeks now .  The plants have been producing fewer blooms each week - starting in October and I assumed they were drawing to a close.   I wanted to extend the season as best I could, so in mid-October, when we were facing a hard frost on a couple of nights, I protected the dahlias with some frost covers .  It appeared to work - and they kept on blooming.   But, starting in November (when the weather turned cooler), I stopped watering the dahlias and began to think about my plan for trying ...

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...

Every Fall, I've gone about protecting our Disneyland Roses (Floribunda Roses) from Winter using an insulation method of laying Fall leaves around the bush.  Typically, I take a small ring of chicken wire and create a ring.  Anchored by a bamboo pole, I erect the chicken wire ring around the rose and fill the center with leaves that I pick up off the lawn.  Some of those leaves are chopped up with the mower, some are just raked up and piled in there. This post from November 2022 shows how I set up that Winter Protection for roses last year .   H ere's another post showing Fall 2020 that shows similar chicken wire rings and leaves that I used to overwinter the crowns of our Disneyland Roses. That system seemed to work just fine.  It wasn't elegant, but (*knock on wood*) I haven't lost a Disneyland Rose yet.  But, my roses are starting to get large and unwieldy.  That has made the chicken wire rings more challenging every year.  So, I went of...

I took a walk around the garden this weekend thinking about what I needed to do to button the yard and beds up for the Winter and came across a bunch of rabbit-caused problems.  The dang rabbits are giving me a lot of worries about this Winter.  I posted about some of the problems they've caused over the years including how they went whole hog on our small Oakleaf Hydrangeas last year .  We didn't get ANY blooms because of their chomping.  They ate off ALL the most recent growth - and Oakleaf Hydrangeas bloom on 'old wood' (aka...last season's growth) .   Those dang! rabbits have destroyed all of my Toad Lillies , killed a Canadian Hemlock tree , stunted some of sedges and chewed off a bunch of branches on our Hicks Yews.   Knowing my enemy, I've started to protect things with cages of chicken wire - including these Arrowwood (Chicago Lustre) Viburnum  and some of our Hemlocks .  And...(this year)... ALL of our Oakleaf Hydrangeas ....

The last time, I posted on our toad lilies that I planted this Spring was earlier this month when I shared some photos of the buds that were about to burst and show flowers for the first time in our yard.  Fast forward to today and when I was out in back, I noticed that ALL of the flowers were gone.  Cut right off below where the buds were located.  I say 'cut', but what I really think I mean is 'chewed' right off.  By whom?  I'm guessing rabbits.   I planted these in late Spring . See below for a photo showing how these toad lilies were clipped/chewed right off.   This means that we didn't get ANY flowers from these.  Or at least, I didn't SEE them.   Note to my future self:  protect the toad lilies with some pest-fencing next year.  Maybe with some poultry wire to ring these up?  Seems like the critters like the buds and not the leaves.

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...