Why I Oughta...

Yesterday, I posted about my first experience with trying to dig up and save dahlia tubers using the "saran wrap method" .  In that post, I talked about how I decided to leave a couple of tubers in the ground to see how they would do.  We're in Zone 6a/5b, so dahlia tubers are *not supposed* to survive our Winter.  But...because of the unique setting, I thought I'd give it a shot.  By 'unique setting', I'm talking about what I think is a small, potential 'microclimate' that exists on the side of our house. By 'microclimate', I mean...an area that is slightly "warmer" than the rest of our garden.  I'm not talking a huge difference.  But, I suspect there's some difference. Why?   Well...experience, mostly.  And, the Disneyland Roses.   I had Disneyland Roses up front and along the side.  The three in the front...lost their first Winter.  The three along the house?  All have survived. What makes it unique?   Fi...

I have a little cluster of Carex Montana that I planted in Summer of 2023 along the beginning of the impromptu flagstone path along the south entry of our house.  I picked them up at Northwind Perennial Farm and they were just plug-sized .  I put them in next to the Boxwoods that are under the Linden trees and allowed them to anchor the 'corner' of the path.   These things stood-out to me so much this season that I posted about them just a month-or-so ago when I said they were thriving in this deep-shade location .  In that post, I mentioned that I "should plant 12 more of these along the path".   With Fall Planting season here, I decided to try to divide some of these Carex Montanas to get a couple of free plants.  Like I've done with other divisions - when I haven't divided said plant before - I hedged and left one of the three intact.  I didn't touch the one in back.  But, I dug up and divided the other two - which were a little bit ...

What a difference two weeks make.  Earlier this month, I posted about our Disneyland Roses and described them as 'struggling '.  This is the second year where they 'struggled' - including an infestation of Sawfly Larvae.  The three bareroot ones didn't come back this season and I suspect it was the result of the pests.  As I've done in previous years, I've begun to feed the three remaining Floribunda roses with a combo fert + systemic insecticide on the first of the month (May, June).   But, that wasn't enough.  The leaves of the roses were lace-like and the plant seemed to be in decline. That's when I took drastic measures and first sprayed Neem Oil on them every few days follwing by  bombing all three of them with Eight insecticide dust .  The remaining foliage had a ghost-like quality with the white dust clinging to the leaves and stems.  For days and (now) weeks.     These Disneyland roses grow in 'flushes'.  At ...

A month or so ago, I scattered a couple of seed packages of Nicotiana Jasmine in the new cut flower bed on the southside of our house.  Nicotiana seeds are TEENY TINY.  Like, REALLY teeny tiny.  You can't really place the seeds, rather...you have to scatter them.   So...that's what I did:  scattered them in the new cut flower bed.  I also tossed in some Zinnia seeds.  Here's a look back at the bed before I planted anything, but soon added some Dahlias, too .   These Nicotiana alata grandiflora - Jasmine Tobacco - were in seed packets that had a 2022 date on them, so I wasn't sure if they were viable.  Below is the seed packet: Looking back at my Google Photos archive, I see that I put these seeds down on May 21st.  Exactly one month ago.  What does the bed look like today?   See below: Those are direct-sown seeds of Nicotiana Jasmine in just four weeks.  Some of them are almost up to my waist.  They're ...

Last year, we had three established Disneyland Roses and three bareroot plantings.  All three of the bareroot floribunda roses didn't come back this Spring.  And, the three established ones - while blooming very well this year - are showing signs of struggle with their foliage.  Last week, I gave them their second feeding of the season and used a 'combo' fert + systemic treatment granular that is billed to handle both insect/pests and fungus/diseases. Last year, I saw the foliage of these roses start to decline and while I'm PRETTY sure I had some sawfly larvae (lace-like foliage), I don't know if that was ALL that I was dealing with out there.  Fungus?  Other disease?  Perhaps. Last December, I posted about my Sawfly Larvae experience and that's how I was thinking of approaching this season :  combo fert+insect systemic and periodic spraying with Neem Oil on the leaves.  As I mentioned, I've applied two treatments of fert+ this year.  And.....

I've been pushing myself to do more flowers in 2024 - and that includes dahlia tubers.  I posted recently about how I transplanted the Melina Fleur tubers that I started in containers into the new flower bed on the southside of our house.  Earlier this year, I picked up three Orange Nugget Dahlia tubers at Menards and did the same container-start with them .  This past weekend, I dug the three of them into that same southside bed.   Below, you can see the three sprouted tubers - Orange Nugget Dahlias. Below is a look at the foliage that has sprouted from one of the Orange Nugget tubers: I have a few more tubers to get in the ground and when those are done, I'll have ten-or-so dahlias in teh ground.  

The southside sideyard of our property is like most suburban sideyards.  Long and narrow.  It is also one of the very few areas outside of our front yard where we get A LOT of sun.  Over the years, I've planted some things over there including three Disneyland Roses , a pair of espaliered Sugar Tyme Crabapple trees , some Summer Beauty Allium, Karl Foerster Grasses, a few various allium bulbs, our Indiana Street Iris  and last Fall I added a small Blue Star Juniper .  Closer to the front of the house, we have a pair of Limelight Hydrangeas that are adjacent to the porch. The bed along this side of the house has been the same size since we moved in:  long and thin and hugging the foundation.  Something about 18" wide.  Below is a photo showing the bed as it looked before I started this new bed project.  One other note (to future Jake) - the orange spray paint shows where the cable line is buried.   I've been talking about growing flo...

Last Fall, when I was digging up/out the (extended) IB2DWs bed for the small conifer garden along the property line, I turned to a mix of grass-removal techniques.  The whole area was turf, so I did three things:  Dug it out, smothered it/covered it up and flipped it over (and smothered it).   For the material that I excavated, I brought most of it over to the southside of the house and used it to fill in the little gully/swale on the side of the house.  And, I tucked in a bunch of it (flipped over) along the side of the porch where I'd seen some erosion over the years.  On this side of the house, we have just ONE downspout that handles a big portion of the roof and when it gets clogged up, that gutter 'tops'.  That's one source of the erosion.  The other is the downspout outlet.  Whatever *does* get down the downspout, comes out one of those surface drains.    That 'flipped' turf was a way to raise the ground-level here.  And,...

Right around this time every (early) March, the green tips of a set of daffodil bulbs emerge from the mulch in the bed behind the secondary Northern Red Oak tree.  These were inherited - and I didn't plant them.  I've observed them over the years - as far back as our first Spring here (2018) -  and here's last year's post .  They have flowered exactly ONCE.  Just once - in 2021 .   Will they bloom this year?  I doubt it.

At the end of May - just about 90 days ago - I planted a series of Ajuga 'Chocolate Chip' plugs around the beds including a border of six right in front of some well-established Fanal Astilbes.  They went in small and have put on some size in the Summer as you'd imagine. I recently posted about a different set of Ajuga 'Chocolate Chip' in our front yard that had grown to fill in the bed .  Those, however, had a six-plus month headstart because they went in the Fall of 2022.  The six in the backyard can be see in the photo below.  They're not near touching each other, but they've put on that two-toned foliage and look good at the front of the border: Last Fall, I added a bunch of Autumn Ferns (only some of which made it over-winter ), but it sure feels like if I come across a good late-season deal on Ajuga 'Chocolate Chip', there's like...I don't know...a dozen places I could plant A LOT of them:  the front porch beds, sideyard(s), in the fr...

Posting a photo and trying to take a 'partial dubya' for a down-list item on my 2022 to-do list in the garden and yard .  This is an item that I was pretty sure I wasn't going to solve - and in fact - stated that on my late-season check-in .  But...I wanted to post here in the [garden diary] a note to show that I should take a partial victory.  Why?  I transplanted a small Karl Foerster Feather Reed Grass that was under the Norway Maple to back by the gate.  See below, for a photo of the grass next to the fence gate on the south side: #24 on the list this year read like this : Clean up the south side gate entrance area. Expand the bed forward towards the street (and fill in the gully), lay out large flagstones for walkway and add self-closing gate hardware. Think about cleaning out strawberries that have run wild there and (potentially) expand the beds under the Lindens. This grass is helpful in moving that from 'kinda' to 'yes...a little bit'.   

Late last season, I planted six small upright Hicks Yews in a little row about half-way back in the southside bed of the backyard .  My thought was that I was going to to try to bring a little bit of repetition to the landscape by trying to mirror or repeat the Hicks Yew hedge that I've been growing along the back of our property.   They all seemed to have done just fine this season, but earlier this Spring, I undertook a shrub project that involved relocating the four Lilacs from this area and replacing them with three Green Giant Thujas.  If you look at this post showing the planting of the Thujas , you can see the six small Hicks Yews.  In that post, I talked about how I needed to relocate some of these Yews and with the temperatures dropping, I was finally able to get around to starting that relocation.  Below, you can see one of the Green Giant Thujas and a hole in the mulch directly in front of it where I dug the Yew out of as it was a pretty tight ...

Earlier this Summer, I planted a series of Caladium tubers DIRECTLY in the beds on the southside - near the Fanal Astilbe colony .  I planted them right on the border of the bed and hoped they'd fill in the gap between the current perennials and the border.  These were bought as tubers from Costco and being a Zone 5b gardener, these are (for us) annuals.  They're also (at least to me) tropicals.  Why do I mention tropicals?  Because one of 2022 to-do items ( #14 ) was to work with more tropicals IN the landscape.  And #16 was to work with shade annuals .  This does BOTH of those things.   Five weeks after planting the tubers, we're seeing some action.  Below is a look at one of these Caladiums that have popped up: There appear to be five or six groupings of these white Aaron Caldiums that have emerged.  Once they all grow up and leaf-out, I'll take a group photo.   This is my first season growing a GROUP of tropical tubers...

The colonies of Summer Beauty Ornamental Onion - Allium - are looking full and happy in the various spots of our garden.  All of them are showing a series of buds that are - right now - downward-facing - and ready to explode with Summer color.   Last year, these were further along with their white flowers extending upwards by mid-July.   So, these are a bit behind.   I should use these in a few more spots, so I'll put that on my 2023 to-do list (along with groundcover).

On the southside of our house, we have three different Disneyland Rose bushes.  They're floribunda roses and the two that are to the furthest East were planted directly into their spots and on the closest to our backyard was transplanted last Spring.  That transplanted one seemed to recover once Spring arrived and leaf'd out .   During the past two winters, I've built a little ring around these Disneyland roses with a net of garden/chicken wire and then filled it with mulched leaves in an attempt to protect them from the dangerous Winter temperatures.  However, I don't really know the efficacy of the protection since in the 2020/2021 Winter, I protected all of them.  So, this past Fall, I decided to leave one of them out - without any protection other than being tucked in against the house on the southside.  You can see the photo below showing the transplanted Disneyland Rose on the left - without protection - and one of the other, larger ones - on the...

About ten days ago, I posted some photos and details about a new pair of Crabapple trees that I planted right alongside our house on the south side that I'm planning on training into an espalier.  In that post, I talked about how the only thing over there were the three Disneyland Roses.  But, I don't think I did the three Floribunda roses (the *only* roses we have) justice.  Because they're STILL looking really great and throwing off some beautiful, multi-hue'd blooms: These roses started blooming in early Summer - photo from June 10th - and have gone through at least three cycles of flowers.  I haven't watched these that closely over the years, but have shown similar late Summer/early Fall blooms last year in late August .  And, by mid-October last year , they still had flowers on them, but were beginning to fade.   There are two that have been here since 2018 and one that I transplanted this Spring.  Below, is the one closet to the front of t...

That's a photo of Dorianell's Cake Shop - once located at 1114 W 51st Street, Chicago, IL 60609.  It was in the Back of the Yards neighborhood, just a few blocks west and one block north of Sherman Park on Racine and Garfield. My sister Vic sent that photo to me.  And it is the first time that I'ver ever seen it.   That's where my Mom grew up.  Upstairs.  And that's her dad's bakery on the first floor.  I've heard a lot about "the bakery", but I never knew it had a name.  Nor what it looked like. Turns out, it isn't *just* a bakery; it is a "cake shop". I can't totally explain it, but this photo makes me really happy.  It also gives me so many ideas and thoughts.    I've talked about what the sign and exterior would look like if I ever did a spot of my own.  I guess I've found the name for my pizza place .  (I'm not doing a pizza place.) The name of the place?  Dorianell's?  That's a combination of my Mom a...

Above you can see what I've been calling our "Teardown Hydrangea" in its current state in the Fall of 2019.  I've documented this over time here on the blog since "acquisition" to today.  Starting with the beginning, in October of 2017, I dug some plants out of a yard down the street before they were tearing down a house to build .  In that bucket of plants was a hydrangea that looked really ratty.  Dry and unhealthy.  I didn't have much faith that it was going to make it.  And...frankly, I wasn't really certain that it even *was* a hydrangea!  Surprisingly enough, it survived the Winter and came back in Spring of 2018.  By last August, it has grown a bit and even flowered with a handful of blooms .  If you look then, this was the first time that it was showing off any lime-color in the flowers - which helps point me in the direction of the variety.  They're not (at least now) cone-shaped, but more ball-shaped.  I think that mig...

For Mother's Day this year, Nat's Mom gave her a small Flowering Tobacco Jasmine plant that came in a little plastic capsule.  There was very little instructions with it other than that it was potentially poisonous (see ASPCA page on it being poisonous to dogs here !).  Nat's Mom has given us a few Disneyland Roses ( first one in 2017 and two more in 2018 ) and a couple of hydrangeas , but this is the first annual that she's gifted us. I wasn't sure where to put it, so I ended up sticking it on the side of our house on the southside - near where I put the 2018 Disneyland roses and was planning to do a Belgian Fence.  I didn't pay it much attention and didn't even water it consciously.  And look at it above:  beautifully tall and graceful.  But, this isn't just a looker.  Nope.  It does a couple of things that are interesting.  First...it transforms from day to evening.  The listing on Select Seeds calls it a "night bloomer" ....