Why I Oughta...

For those who are on the receiving end of our Christmas card, there was something special included this year.  I write an annual 'year in review' post on a family website and include screenshots of the front/back of the card.   I'm not linking to it here, but I am going to paste a screenshot of one of the photos below.  I've redacted some of the info and blurred out the faces of some of the participants, but there's something noteworthy in the copy.  Can you pick it up?  That's right, people.  In addition to the typical seasonal greetings (Christmas, Hannukah, New Year), we saw in 2025 a return to the inclusion of " Happy Festivus " (To all those who celebrate, of course) on the card.   I'm calling that a win for the year.  This isn't the first year of including Festivus greetings to our friends, family and neighbors (for the rest-of-us), but for reasons that I don't quite understand, we took a few years off being included.   S...

The air temperature recently exceeded the water temperature in Barth Pond and created this eerie scene with a mist coming off the water and hanging over the pond.  We couldn't get all the way around the pond as the cross-over bridge in the Southeast corner was topping-over via the little spillway out there.   So, instead, we walked the half-way around to the bridge and came back.  The Geese are still hanging around and between their mess and the hissing, it sure would be nice if there was a good way to chase them off.  

Yesterday, I posted a 'garden dreaming' post about building a new, raised bed section in our backyard to grow even more vegetables and flowers.   And, right before the new year, I posted by 2025 to-do list scorecard .  I bring both of those posts up because they are both involved in this post about lazy beds.   First, the scorecard .  I graded myself 18/25, but one of the seven incompletes was #23 - "More Lazy Bed Extensions" and I mentioned in the post that I have reserved the right to update my scorecard total if I get these bed extensions done before the end of January.   Time is important on these lazy bed extensions as we need time to suppress the turf that exists, 'melt away' the cardboard and allow the biosolids to mellow out a little bit.  I've done them in the Fall and the beds were ready come Spring.  And, I've done some on a quicker turnaround.   If I get these done in January, I'll have 120ish days of cure time....

The hits-and-misses that I've had with cut flowers and vegetables this past year has me (already) thinking about next year.  I wanted to make 2025 the year of 'even more cut flowers' and with all of the dahlias that I planted, we made that happen.  But, the constraints of our property mean that I'm close to the limit on what I can do going forward.  We have a ton of garden space in the backyard.  But, MOST OF IT is in shade.  That means that if I want to grow more things like dahlias and other cut flowers that need sun, I have to rethink things.   I could plant up more of the front yard or...I could do something bigger.   That something BIGGER is a cut flower garden.  In a part of the backyard that *is* in sun for a good part of the day.   And, a cut flower garden that uses raised beds.  We had raised beds in Elmhurst that lived inside of a fenced-in enclosure.  That garden produced a BOUNTY every season.  Vegeta...

2025 has come to a close here on the blog with this non-gardening post being the 366th post.  I seem to have over-posted in June (31 posts), but otherwise have hit my annual goal of posting everyday for the year.  Never-the-less, That means that 2025 is not a Gold Star blogging year, but still got the job done. Last year, I put up 367 posts (Leap Year)  - another non-Gold-star year due to duplicate date posts. This is the 11th straight year of 365+ posts and the 21st year of blogging on my own domain.    I broke the streak in 2013, but there were 3 other years (2010, 2011, 2012) that I went the distance before taking off to write on a political blog for that year.   At 11 (2014 --> 2025) years, that makes it 4000+ straight days of flexing this writing muscle.  Pretty, pretty, pretty good.   Of course, the bulk of the posts were focused in my [garden diary] and I once-again failed at trying to distribute the content beyond being indexe...

I've mentioned that Winter snow came early this year and that cut-short some of my typical garden cleanup. It also dropped most of the leaves on the Frans Fontaine Hornbeams that normally hang around all Winter.   And, those two things - snow packing down and leaves falling - has created a full bed of leaf litter at the feet of the Hornbeams.  Below is a photo showing the fallen leaves that have been matted-down by the heavy snow (that has since melted).   Just in FRONT of these trees is the newly-expanded Pizza Oven bed.  That bed is full of clay soil. One of the things I've been talking about doing this Winter is amending the clay soil to make it a little bit more hospitable to gardening next year - especially with more dahlias on their way.   My first thought was to utilize municipal biosolids and just pile it ON TOP OF THE CURRENT MULCH.  But, now, seeing this leave litter, I'm thinking that I should try to rake it up on top of the clay b...

In May, I added three upright Wichita Blue Junipers to the (newly expanded) pizza oven bed .  They were small - in two-gallon nursery containers and from the big box nursery.  But, they were priced right and I've been eyeing them for a while , so I took the chance.  I planted them in a staggered pattern forming a triangle. Four months later (early September), I p osted an update with new photos and talked about how they seemed to have handled the heat of Summer with minor browning-out.   Now, as we head into our first Winter, below is a photo showing them as of late December.   Here is the original inspiration photo showing Wichita Blue Junipers with some Stachys Hummelo planted in mass .    I didn't get around to planting anything around these, but that will be on my 2026 to-do list.  But, if I'm grading myself as a gardener, I'd say that I lived up to the statement that:  " Conifers Should Come First ".   Have these gro...