Why I Oughta...

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 Magnolia o

The tulip bulbs that I planted last Fall in the front yard ( I planted 57 of them last Fall ) have really come up this Spring.  I'll take a proper photo of all of them - from the front - when they are all flowering.  But, for now, I wanted to document the location of the bulbs and where I can add even more this Fall.  From the front porch, this is the view of the stand of tulips around the Norway Maple tree: I wanted to post this on the blog in the Garden Diary so I remember WHERE to plant this Fall's bulbs to really fill in this area with tulips - so I circled these areas in the photo below.  I can see surrounding this tree with even more bulbs. I've posted about these tulips this Spring - first when they came up .  And then again, when they were covered in snow .  

 Last week, we were snapped back to reality with a heavy, wet snow.  False Spring had come and gone.  But, what remained after the snow fell were still some signs of Spring including these tulip starters that had come up from the mulch.  With the snow laying on top, it suddenly became VERY easy to figure out how many of these tulips were up and where they were located.  I suppose you can call that a silver lining, right?

Last week, I marked the first tulip bulb of Spring in our front yard that had emerged out of the cocoa bean hull mulch and talked about how I added 57 new tulip bulbs in the Fall of 2020 to that bed.  This past weekend, I was looking around the area where I planted tulip bulbs in the backyard and saw the first one coming up around the large Oak tree.  Below, you can see the tip emerging from the wood chips that almost looks candy corn-ish. In this area, I planted way more than I did in the front and put in 114 total new tulip bulbs around this area, so I'm hoping for quite a show this Spring.  I used a combination of two purples, white and yellow bulbs, but I'm not certain which variety this particular bulb is based on the early color.  

Just about one year ago, I posted a photo here on the blog showing our first tulip bulb tip that had emerged from the mulch and signaled that Spring was this/close.  Today, I'm posting a similar photo of a tulip bulb tip in our front yard/front porch beds.  Last Fall, I planted 57 additional tulip bulbs - adding 28 yellow, 15 orange and 14 white flowers to our bed where we had our original 50 bulbs.  That makes the full count 107 bulbs, but we've certainly lost some to rot, critters or they have exhausted themselves.   The photo below, is taken a little bit away from the base of the Norway Maple where our legacy bulbs have historically been planted , so I'm thinking this is one of the newly planted ones.   If you've been following along over the years, you'll notice two additional things in the photo above. First, the mulch.  It is Cocoa Bean Hull mulch from the Hull Farm in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin .  I first picked up the idea at the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris w

 Yesterday, I posted how I planted 57 new tulip bulbs (yellow, orange and white ones) in our front yard bed outside of our front porch.  The yellow was added to balance the color, the orange was planted to bring the count of orange ones up to par and I added a little white - just because.  Today, I'm sharing the rest of the tulip bulbs that I picked up for the backyard.  I decided to go with a purple and yellow (and a little white) color combination for the backyard.  In doing a little bit of digging around, I've found that tulips and hostas are good companion plants.  I've (mostly) planted my hostas in shaded areas - shaded by decidious trees that gain their leaves in Spring - and the tulips will come out early and the hostas, when they emerge, will hide the declining foliage of the tulips.   In late June, I dug up, divided and transplanted about a dozen variegated hostas in and around the large 31" Red Oak tree in our backyard .   First is 30 Queen of Night Single L

  Over the weekend, I planted these 57 tulip bulbs in the front bed - underneath the Norway Maple tree outside of our front porch.  This post shows the location of the current tulips from this Spring.  The important bulbs to note in this post are the yellow ones in the middle.  If you recall this post from back in May of 2019, I mentioned how Amy @ Pretty Purple Door said that adding yellow will balance out the red/orange combo .   The tulips that I added are: 28 Yokohama Single Early Yellow Tulips . 15 Darwin Oxford Elite Orange Tulips .  These remind me of the Disneyland Rose. And 14 white (first time adding white to this bed) Purissima (Emperor) Tulips . I originally planted 50 tulip bulbs in this bed.  30 pink/red Crystal Beauty bulbs.  And 20 orange Double Princess tulips. The counts now are: 25 red/pink bulbs 35 orange bulbs 28 yellow bulbs 14 white bulbs 107 total bulbs planted.  But, I know not all of them are still there - due to critters digging things up and seeing some of

A couple of days ago, I posted a before/after photo of our Magnolia tree and the cocoa bean shell mulch that I added and mentioned that I had brought home just 10 bags of cocoa bean hull mulch from Lake Geneva.  Today, you can see our front bed with the balance of the bags laid down.  I was able to add mulch from the front of the bed to around and *just* behind the boxwoods.  We have three Vanilla Strawberry Hydrangeas behind the boxwoods that I didn't have enough mulch in the bags to cover at this point. From this point of view - and down lower near the sidewalk, you can't see *behind* the boxwoods, so it kind of looks finished despite about 50% of the bed not being freshly mulched. When we go back up to Wisconsin in the coming weeks/months when we drive two cars, I'll head over to the Hull Farm and pick up ten more bags of the stuff to finish off the bed. On the far left of the photo, you can see one of the limestone blocks that I installed to create that '

The Orange Double Late Tulip bulbs that I planted in the Fall of 2018 have sprung up and are in bloom while the red-ish Crystal Beauty Fringed Pink Tulips that were planted at the same time haven't flowered at all.  I planted 25 of each at the same time and last year they bloomed (for the first time) at the same time.  You can see that post showing the flowers here .  I count either 23 or 24 of the initial 25 have bloomed this year, so that's a nice year-two-rate. This is the only pop of color that we have in the front yard beds and it comes in early Spring.  Nat was just telling me that she wishes we had more color in the front yard, so that's something we'll have to work on. I posted a photo of these tulips in early March emerging from the mulch .  And, this is the same section that I've covered in the past about trying to 'balance' out the colors by adding yellow to the mix .  I didn't get around to buying bulbs last Fall, but it will be on m

The very first tips of some of our Spring bulbs have started to poke through the mulch.  This is a tulip bulb in our front beds that are covered with cocoa bean hull mulch.  Which...now that I'm looking at this photo - sure looks pretty great.  The cocoa bean mulch is a rich, dark brown and composed of small flakes that are both breaking down, but not disappearing.  Compare the color to the few pieces of bark/wood that are in the bed and you can see how the color is much deeper in the cocoa bean mulch. These bulbs are the same ones that I documented last Spring - but later in March . One of the biggest problems that I have this time of year in this area is keeping these from getting stepped on.  This bed is in between our house and the neighbors whom the girls spend time with.  It is easy to trample these tips if they're not careful.  These are the red and orange tulips that I told myself I needed to augment with yellow .  But...I didn't end up doing it last year.

A couple of weeks ago, I posted some photos of the newly bloomed tulips that came up in our front yard bed right in front of the large Maple tree.  Go see that photo here .  They look - to me at least - to be orange and red.  I say that because the reds were *supposed* to be pink, but they came out much more like a true red.  They looked great.  Or at least I thought they did.  That was, until I came across this ebook from Pretty Purple Door .  It is called " 7 questions to ask yourself to choose the right plants for your garden " and you can get it by giving her your name and email address here on her site .  I'm not going to link directly to the .pdf because she is running a biz, but I do want to show one little nugget that is in that guide.  She talks about color palette and then lists a few of her favorites and a few to avoid.  To be respectful, here's a screenshot, but I've blurred out the parts that aren't relevant here.  (Again...if you want the fu

Number one on my 2019 Gardening To-Do Addendum List was to relocate some of my Fall bulbs.  It didn't make my main To-do list for the year, but the two kind of go together.  Why's that?  Because #8 on the main To-Do list is to add some conifers to the backyard.    My thinking was that if I move these tulips from back against the fenceline, I can replace them with the Weeping White Spruce that I bought and move these closer to the front of the bed.    Here's what these same tulips looked like earlier this Spring .  I started to dig them and realized that moving blooming tulips is not for the faint of heart.  I dug deep and tried to pull out the bulbs and the ground with them.  Then, I poked around and tried to remove whatever weeds that had glom'd on to the bulbs and stuck them back in the ground.  Everything I've read about Tulips suggests that people often cut off the tulip leaves far too early because once the flower blooms, they figure that they should

Last fall, I planted 50 tulip bulbs in the bed out front of our porch in the front yard at the base of a large Norway Maple tree.  They were a blend of 25  Orange Double Late Princess Tulips and 25  Crystal Beauty Fringed Pink Tulips .  And I followed up with some photos of these tulip bulbs emerging from their long Winter's nap under the bed of mulch in a post in late March of this Spring .   At that time, I wasn't sure how many of the 50 bulbs were going to flower and after seeing some marks of critters pulling up the bulbs in the Winter, I was hoping for the best. But now the flowers are fully bloomed and you can see the blend of tulips in the photo at the top of this post.  I counted 45 of the 50 bulbs had bloomed - 90% - which I'm pretty satisfied with in this mass planting.  I love the way these look and from the street, they give off a really wonderful shot of color.  And...I'm already thinking of adding EVEN MORE tulip bulbs in orange and red this Fall. 

Back in the Fall of 2017 (our first fall), I planted 30 tulip bulbs along the fenceline in our backyard in between the section where our espalier system is set up and where we are growing a series of hydrangeas.  They popped up for the first time in March of 2018 and I documented that here .  And by Mid-May they had bloomed in a beautiful combination of orange and yellow .  I mentioned last year that I thought it was going to be best to relocate these bulbs, but guess what?  I never got around to moving them.  This post claims that the *best* time to transplant tulip bulbs is the late Fall - about the same time that I put these in the ground.  From the post : The best time to transplant tulips is in the late fall, according to Ron Smith, Horticulturist at the North Dakota State University Extension Service. In the fall, bulbs have completed their growing cycle and lie dormant. Moving dormant tulips doesn't interrupt the growing cycle and makes the bulbs less susceptible to

Seems like this is the week for (finally) some action in our garden/yard that indicates Spring is actually arriving.  Yesterday, I posted a photo of what I think is a 'clump' 1 of Ostrich Ferns.  Today, let's talk about bulbs.   Last October, I planted 50 Tulip bulbs in one of our beds out in front of the porch, just underneath a giant Norway Maple .  At the time, I did my best to protect them from various critters, but as time went on, I noticed some digging in the area.  Between the skunks looking for grubs and perhaps squirrels with their eyes on the actual bulbs, somebody was pretty active shortly after I planted these bulbs.   And the soil?  I've talked about the soil we have close to our foundation.  It is terrible right now.  All clay.  If you read my Top 10 2019 Spring/Summer Gardening To-Do List , you'll remember that #1 on my list was to continue to improve the soil .  But, I've only have had one full garden season to work the soil and the

About ten days ago, I shared a photo of a set of fringed tulip bulbs that I expected to get in the ground.  You can see that post here .    They're called Crystal Beauty and are a reddish-pink in color.  I ended up buying two packages of them and put them in the spot you see above.  Along with these other "double late" Orange Princess Tulip bulbs.  All-in, there are now 50 little bulbs in the ground in our front beds in between the large Maple tree and our hostas and from the sign post you see in the photo above and the edge of the bed. Here's the packaging of the Orange Princess bulbs, but note they're called "Double Late". What's that mean? From Gardenia.net : Award-winning Tulip 'Orange Princess' is a lovely peony-flowered tulip featuring light nasturtium-orange petals, flushed with reddish-purple and glazed lightly in warm pink. Its chubby bowl-shaped flowers are also tipped with green on the outer petals.  ...Because of th

It is early October and around here that means Fall bulb planting.  Just like last year, where I planted 30 tulip bulbs and some Allium bulbs , I'm planning on sticking both in the ground this year although there are a few differences.   First, I'm giving more consideration to the 'where' these tulips are going.  And second:  these are 'fringed tulips', which is kind of cool, right? Fringed Tulips seem to be pleasers.  From this listing on White Flower Farm : Fringed Tulips have flower petals that are edged with finely cut fringes that remind us of fine quartz crystals or frost on window panes. If you're seeking a beautiful novelty bedding plant, you've found it. Last year, I planted the tulips along the fenceline in the back and after seeing them come up this season, I'm not happy with their location and think that I'm likely to dig them up and move them somewhere else.   I'm also thinking that they might find a good home i

After a long, cold early Spring, we finally have some color popping up in the #newoldbackyard.  However....I only count 24 of them, though.  ( I planted 30 tulips last fall .)  I also posted about these very tulips emerging for the first time earlier this year.  They're located along the fenceline largely because that's where we had available space last fall because the area in front of them was lawn.  But, as you can see in the photo above, we expanded the bed (and relocated the Automower boundary wire), so this fall I'm planning on relocating these bulbs from the fence to the front of the bed. Also, interesting, is the blue-ish flower growing behind the bulbs.  Our neighbors have it running in their beds and it has crept across the fence.  I'm pretty sure it is Virginia Bluebells , and it is quite striking, so I'm not unhappy about it migrating northwards.   I'll keep an eye on them this Spring and perhaps if they continue to creep, they deserve their ow

Woot, woot.  Spring has sprung in our New Old Backyard/Garden .  Or at least...signs of Spring have sprung.  Last fall, I planted 30 bulbs near the fence line on the southside of our property .  15 Yellow Triumph Tulips.  And 15 Orange Darwin Hybrid Tulips.  And on a recent walk around the yard, we discovered these tips emerging from the soil.  Above, you can see a close up a two of them.  And down below, you can see many more of them.   I didn't count them, but it didn't seem like 30 bulbs had broken through.  What is interesting to me is that the tips are coming up red.  They almost appear like peony shoots , don't they?  I've documented tulips (and other bulbs) emerging from the ground for the past few Springs.  Here's a look at them from 2017 that I posted in late February .  These mature bulbs are way further past the new ones in this post.  And here's the photo from 2016 .  Both of those were at Equation Boy/Man's house.  And speaking of

A few days ago, I posted some photos of a handful of Purple Sensation Allium bulbs that we did a fall bulb planting with around one of the big oak trees in our #newoldbackyard.  Photos here .  I mentioned that we also planted some tulips on that same day.   Today's post shows off the bulbs of the two varieties that we put down.  I picked up 2 15 packs of tulip bulbs at Menards that were on sale (they also had the 11% rebate thing going on...which....seems right now to be an almost constant thing??).  The first set was 15 Darwin Hybrid Tulips in orange.  You can see the packaging below: According to Longfield Gardens , Darwin Tulips have some special characteristics:  Darwin hybrids produce big, showy flowers with a classic tulip shape: broad at the base and slightly narrower at the top. They come in a rainbow of rich, saturated colors that range from white through yellow, orange, red and pink, including several lovely bi-colors.  Darwin hybrids are reliable performer