Why I Oughta...

In the middle of April, I planted a *very small caliper* Black Tupelo (or Black Gum) native tree in our parkway as a replacement for another tree that didn't come back this Spring .  At that time, the Tupelo still had NOT leaf'd out and had some curly branches attached all over the trunk.   Almost immediately, the apical meristem (leader) die'd back and I thought the tree was lost.   But, thanks to some (occasional and deep) watering, the tree seems to have navigated the hot part of Summer and is (mostly) leafy-green in late September.  This is five months after being put in the ground: I haven't pruned anything on this tree other than taking off the dead leader.  The lower-trunk branches are still curly and there's some red-ish Fall color that is starting to appear on a few of the leaves.   The Black Tupelo is noted for its "pyramidal form", but so far....our tree isn't showing any thing close to that shape.   I'll watch this (and ...

For the better part of the Spring and beginning of Summer, our area was in a drought.  We had very little rain.  Then, starting about three or four weeks ago, we had TONS of rain.  The problem is that the drought we experienced was hard on a lot of our garden and yard.  I kept up on watering as best that I could, but since we don't have built-in irrigation, I was bound to miss some things.   One of the trees that has suffered from the lack of water this year is our little Weeping White Spruce.  Here, below, is a photo showing how it has dropped a bunch of needles and has a lot of brown on it.  I'm very concerned about it not being able to recover and is on the way towards browning out completely.   I noticed it browning out when we came back from a week in Wisconsin and since then, I've tried to baby it with water - every few days a direct watering from the hose. This story from the University of Minnesota Extension office talks about th...