Why I Oughta...

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...

Yesterday, I posted about our visit to St. Louis and eating at Blueberry Hill with their awesome Schlitz Beer lamps .  We ate good in St. Louis and I figure I should share more.  Being a pizza nerd, a visit to St. Louis isn't complete without grabbing a St. Louis-style pizza.  Not familiar with St. Louis being a regional pizza style?  Start here with this post on Serious Eats .  It is thin, tavern-cut pizza with the most defining characteristic being that it is topped with provel cheese. Provel is a combo of Swiss, provolone and Cheddar.  We ordered a medium pizza because it was an odd time of day - and we were on our way to the ballpark for a game.  We had half plain cheese, half pepperoni.  They lay the 'roni under the provel, so there's no cuppage or #ronicups to be found at Imo's . This pie felt like a close cousin of Chicago tavern pizza, but since we didn't order the sausage, it is hard for me to make that link directly. There's tons ...

Almost nine years ago, I posted a photo of a beautiful Schlitz Beer lamp from Blueberry Hill down near Washington University in St. Louis.  That photo is here .  We recently went back to St. Louis and toured Nat's old stomping grounds including lunch at Blueberry Hill, of course.  I was immediately struck with the vintage Schlitz lamps once again. The photo above you see is from this recent trip and the lamps are the same nine years later.  (But...the quality of low-light photography from my phone is CLEARLY way, way better, right??) Blueberry Hill actually has a post on their own site that talks about these lamps .  Turns out, there are ten of them  and they were made in the year before the restaurant opened: It’s hard not to notice the classic Schlitz lamps illuminating our Dining Room-Blueberry Hill’s ambiance certainly would not be the same without the ten vintage lamps adorning our wooden booths. ...These vintage pieces are straight from 19...

With my past few trips to Japan for work, I've increasingly become interested in Japanese-style gardening and the art of bonsai.  I've been thinking about the large-scale conifers that I saw across Tokyo like this one and these pines in the outer gardens of the Imperial Palace  and thinking about how I can bring something like *that* to our yard as we grow our conifer collection. At the same time, my visit to the Morimae Bonsai Shop in Ginza along with subscribing to a few bonsai YouTube channels like Heron's Bonsai out of London  and Mirai Bonsai's Beginner Series has sparked my interest in the art of bonsai. This video that talks about nursery stock material selection from Mirai Bonsai pushed me to head to Home Depot to see if I could find something I could buy that was inexpensive to try my hand at shaping a small tree. My bonsai journey starts with this Cypress Hinoki that you see in the photo above.  Bought at Home Depot for $9.98, this Cypress is go...

I had a credit an an online tree nursery from a tree that we tried that died that was about to expire, so I went hunting on their site to find something useful and interesting for our yard.  To date, we've planted 26 trees ( full list here ) and have 21 of those trees that are still with us. If you read my post about my 2019 to-do list , you might remember that #8 was to 'do something with conifers'.  I started my 'conifer journey' this Spring by adding three Gold Cone Junipers to the backyard .  But those aren't technically trees as they're classified as shrubs . Taking those couple of dynamics (having a credit and wanting to do something with conifers), I decided to take a peek at our landscape plan and decided to pick out six VERY SMALL Canadian Hemlocks.  You can see the size of them in the photo at the top.  With the pot, these are about three feet tall. This post is about just three of them, though.  I'll post again when I get the other th...

Back in September of 2017, I posted about how I had come across a photo of a Weeping Cedar and immediately fell in love with the style of tree.  It was on my 'tree wish list' for the rest of 2017 and 2018 when I found a small one at Home Depot on a random trip.  It is a Weeping Himalayan Cedar Emerald Falls variety and after planting it, I stake'd it to a bamboo rod and began to train it upwards.  By August of last year, I shared another photo of the tree that had seemingly established itself and was very green.  You can see that photo here .   I was happy with the tree and figured that we were on our way in terms of getting this thing to take off.  I even went an additional step and applied Wilt-Pruf to the Cedar to help protect it from the winter elements .   And the Weeping Cedar seemed to weather the Winter just fine.  It stayed green for the most part with some slight dulling.  Until March.  When it started to b...

A few days ago, I posted a photo and the backstory of our new three-bin compost setup that I've created out in the back of our property and talked about how I plan on using the new setup along with my existing compost tumbler .  The biggest issue I've had with the tumbler is that I've learned that composting is a 'batch process'.  I get a great batch of compost out of the tumbler, but I usually don't get it fully done until about June of each year. To document the timing of it this year, I am sharing the photo at the top of this post.  This is what the material in our compost tumbler looks like right now.  You can see it isn't quite "Black Gold", but it is getting there.  The carbon material has almost fully broken down and the material has a loose consistency where you can put your hand in and it doesn't come out muddy but rather the stuff mostly falls right off.  It is rich and almost fluffy at this point.  Good, but NOT great.  The ...