Why I Oughta...

Back during quarantine (Spring/Summer of 2020), I bought eight very inexpensive apple trees and planted them about two feet apart along our fence .  Then, I proceeded to lop them them off at about 24" from the ground and hoped for the best.  They all seemed to throw off some new buds and I thought that maybe they'd all do fine.  I wired them up by mid-Summer and saw some new growth.    But, by August, I had three trees that had died .   #1, #5, #6 (from the left) were all lost - that was two Golden Delicious and a Honeycrisp trees. When I was planning this Belgian Fence espalier, I did a little bit of research into pollinators and what combination(s) were needed to bear fruit.  I'm KNOW that Honeycrisp trees pollinate Golden/Yellow Delicious Trees.  And...I'm pretty sure that Golden/Yellow Delicious trees pollinate Honeycrisp apple trees.   So, when I was going to find replacements, I knew that what I had remaining were four Honeycrisp trees and one Golden Delicious t

Last Fall, I bought my first sedges.  They were these Evercolor Everillo Sedges (Carex o. EVERCOLOR 'Everillo' from the Morton Arboretum and I planted them around the trunk of our Cherry Blossom tree .  I initially planted three and this month when I saw them at the Morton Spring sale, I bought two more.   They went up in price (last Fall = $10 each, this Spring = $10.95 each) as you can see from the sale sign below: If you look back at this photo from late September of 2020 , you can tell the color of these after a Summer of growth, but not look at the photo below, they seem to start a little bit more muted.  With five of them planted, I'm starting to get a little bit of a drift going on - right next to the Waterslide Hosta that I planted last year (and the two new ones from this year). I'm about to get these mulched in and that should keep them happy for the hot growing season.  I didn't do a THING to these this Spring - didn't clip off any growth, but thinkin

A couple of weeks ago, I took some steps to head off the annual aphid infestation that has been occuring on our Greenspire Linden trees that leads to them being swarmed by Yellow Jackets who are eating the aphids.  Back in mid-May, I applied a Systemic Soil-Application insecticide and - just to be doubly sure - I also sprayed a persistent contact spray to the leaves just to kill whatever might already be on the leave s.   As a reminder, this is what the underside of the leaves looked like when the Linden Aphids were living on them (back in late Summer 2020).  Doing this check-in on the Lindens (which...are currently espalier'd in a horizontal Cordon, btw), I looked at the underside of the leaves.  And, while I don't see any of the aphids like I did last year, I do see some white, hairy spots at the intersection of the leaf veins.  See below for a zoomed-in shot of the leaves: I've done as close of an inspection as I can on these photos and I can't tell what that hai

Part of the newly carved out beds in our backyard - near our patio - are the only real shots we have for a lot of Sun in the back.  As part of the whole transplanting/order of operations stuff, I transplanted a bunch of our peonies up here and left some spots for annuals.  Well, I treat dahlias as annuals - and don't keep the tubers like a good gardener should - so when I found this bicolor dahlia at a good price, I grabbed it and popped it right into the ground.  It is called a "Labella Maggiore rose bicolor dahlia" and it seems to be off to a decent start in the ground: Below are the tags that show that it gets between 18 and 28" tall - so not huge for dahlias.   The colors on this particular variety remind me of the Disneyland Rose colors that we see later this Summer.  I've grown dahlias in the ground before over in this area and I think that will be a nice feature to replicate every year.   I'll keep these wet and then mulch them in shortly.

I decided to do a couple of (new to me) things with my front lawn this year including some of the things that I've already covered like spoon-feeding a granular with Sea Kelp (applied at end of April and end of May - so far) .  But, this post is intending to cover two other new (to me) things:   First... I'm cutting it shorter than I've done in the past.  For the past couple of years, I put the mower ALL THE WAY up and cut at that length. I had a deep green lawn through most of the Summer and didn't get killed with a water bill.  But, the length came at the cost of neat-ness.  My e-Go mower doesn't have a ton of vacuum power, so there was always a lot of folded over blades. So, a risky change:  This year, I'm putting it on the 4th 'notch' out of the six on my Ego walk behind push mower.  Last year, I was cutting at six.  See below for the difference - which is about an inch shorter. And the second new (to me) thing - which is a companion to that shorter

We have a miniature variegated hosta that sits right below the large Northern Red Oak tree that our tree swing hangs from that I really like.  I'm not sure where it came from, but I am guessing that I pulled it from my Sister-in-laws lot right before they started to build their house back in 2018 .  I ended up stashing a bunch of that stuff back in the far reaches of our yard and mostly forgot about all of it. It was planted near a larger Catalpa tree in the back that the kids like to climb and that meant that it was getting trampled by little and looked a little neglected.  So, I dug it up in June 2019 and transplanted it around the large Oak tree on the north side of the lot.  In that post in 2019, I talked about how I admired this thing and said that as it grows, it was one that I should try to divide to make even more. I posted a follow-up photo of this hosta last Summer (June 2020) and showed off even more new growth as it began to spread out a little bit. Here, below, is a

We lived on Indiana Street in Elmhurst for almost ten years.  In two houses.  One of our own .  And one of Equation Boy/Man and my Sister Vic's .  Our last few years there, we lived next to a couple named Wes and Susie (hmmm...maybe Suzy?  Or Suzie? Who knows...I never asked how to spell it) who were good neighbors.  They had a hot tub and some nice Japanese Maple trees.  Wes was an artist who loved dogs and liked our little puppy (at the time) Lizzie.   One of them spent time in the garden.  (see Japanese Maples) And they had a front parking spot (not quite a driveway because they used the alley behind the house and had a garage back there) that was lined with Bearded Irises.  They always put on a nice show.   Fast forward to this Spring and Wes and Susie have moved out and someone is tearing down the house to build something new.  My Sister Vic was able to grab some of those Bearded Irises from the front and save them before the bulldozers arrived.  The Japanese Maples didn't