Why I Oughta...

Like a lot of you guys, I have a whole bunch of Christmas traditions.  Sure, there's the Christmas Train and all the various foodstuffs, but there's also one that is gardening-related:  Planting an amaryllis bulb.  Here's a post showing the two bulbs I planted last year (one from Wannemaker's and one from Menards) .  If you look at that post, you'll notice that the one from Menards - that cost $2.99 - never took off while the $15 version from Wannemakers shot up and bloomed right around Christmas Day.  This year, I simplified things and decided to just do one of these and (obviously) went with what worked last year and bought the $15 version from Wannemakers.  You can see how they pack the bulbs above in a kind of foam carriage to protect the bulb while keeping it free from trapping moisture.  When I was at the store recently, I couldn't remember what variety I bought last year, but remembered that I went with a double flowering version.  So, I poked arou

On a recent trip to Menards, I was in the garden center and was drawn to their fountain setup.  They have a dozen or so fountain ranging from formal tiered fountains to desktop versions.  Some of them are terribly cheesy but others seem ok to me.  But, there are two things that seem to bind them all together:  they're made of fiberglass.  And they're cheap.  Well, relatively cheap.   I've had a fiberglass fountain before at our old house in Elmhurst and I really liked it .  Some of the time.  It was a three tiered traditional fountain with a pineapple on top.  A few things I came to appreciate: 1.  The bowls weren't very deep.  So that meant that I had to constantly (like every other day) fill it with the hose.   2.  The birds loved it.  But they made it SUPER dirty. 3.  It didn't last 2 seasons because I left it out over the winter and it suffered some freezing cracks and was rendered worthless.   Thus, despite having an itchy purchase finger, I pa

About 10 days before Christmas, our amaryllis looked like this .  But on Christmas day?  It had bloomed!  All four ways.  It was a spectacular flower and as luck would have it, the final of the four buds opened on Christmas day.   That's a shot of the white/red beauty above.  There were four of these double petal stars for us to enjoy for a few weeks.   You'll recall that this is the bulb that we picked up at Wannemakers and it was far outperforming the cheap one from Menards .  I'm really so pleased with how this - the $14 version one - worked out for us.  The Menards one ($3 one!), is still chugging along, but it is all green shoots and no stem so far. Next year, the Babe already has plans to get after these things at scale.  And by 'scale', we're talking about 4 or 5 of them.  She's thinking that in addition to us trying a couple different ones, we can work on a project together and be in a position of gifting them already planted around St. Ni