Why I Oughta...

We had the 'front half' of our backyard sodded when we built our house, but left the back half of the backyard completely native.  All the weeds and grass and what have you growing back there.  The bulk of my focus out back has been on the landscaping and mostly left the lawn/turf on autopilot.  I had our Automower running back there, so it kept the lawn pretty low and I don't think I really noticed the HUGE amounts of Wild Onions that were growing in the grass.    If you read my post from a few days ago , you'll know that I recently put down a pre-emergent grassy weed and crabgrass preventer.  That product does NOTHING for Wild Onions.  Well...I suppose that I should start at the beginning of this year.  As our grass was coming back and starting to green-up, I noticed some pockets of dark green, spikey grass.  Or so I thought.  As I went outside, I started to realize that this wasn't grass.  But something else.   I didn't actually really know what this st

Back in December, I posted about an experiment that I was conducting with the application of Wilt-Pruf to one of our Rhododendrons that are located on either side of our back stoop.  Wilt-Pruf is an anti-transpirant that I bought to use on our fresh-cut Christmas Trees, but I also learned can be applied to any evergreen in an attempt to help it get through difficult Winters.  Wilt-Pruf is a natural product made of pine oil and creates a clear, almost flexible coating on the leaves and needles.   I sprayed it on just one of the Rhododendrons and figured it would be useful to compare the results.   The photo you see at the top is shows both of them on top/bottom.  The plant on the top is the one that had Wilt-Pruf applied.  The plant on the bottom was left bare.   The results?  Hard for me to say if it did anything, frankly.  I think the one that was treated has less spotting on the leaves, but maybe that's just random?   Thus, I'd say the experiment is incon

Four weeks ago, I posted a series of photos showing how I had pruned both of the Greenspire Linden trees that we have espaliered into a Horizontal Cordon .  We went from four levels down to three and then restrung the wire to support a new fill-in fourth Cordon.  When removing the top Cordon, I cut what is technically called the Apical Meristem in an attempt to redirect some of the growth this season to the existing Cordons with the goal of beefing them up and then thinking about how we might be able to turn the tips up into a Candelabra shape.  (Scroll down in this post to see the different espalier shapes including a Candelabra .) A few things to call out though: First, in the photo above, you can see that we have one misaligned Cordon level.  On the left, the limb is coming out about four or five inches higher than the limb on the right.  I've trained the one on the right *up*, but there is currently this misalignment.  Is it a deal-killer?  I don't think so.  Especia

One of the amazing things about being online today is that there is a community on the Web for just about any niche interest you might have.  Take...for instance Lawn Care DIYers.  There's a bunch of YouTube "Stars" (I hesitate to call them Stars, but I also am *not* going to call them Influencers because, well, that's just gross.), there are online forums and plenty of bloggers.  There are also tools that have historically been used by the Turf industry (think Golf Course Managers) that have now been set free into the world. One of them is the use of Growing Degree Day Calendars.  What are Growing Degree Days ?  From Wikipedia : Growing degree days (GDD) are a heuristic tool in phenology. GDD are a measure of heat accumulation used by horticulturists, gardeners, and farmers to predict plant and animal development rates such as the date that a flower will bloom, an insect will emerge from dormancy, or a crop will reach maturity. And it turns out, there are GDD

Back in 2017, I showed part of our landscape plant that was just outside of our kitchen window that called for a variety of perennials and some shrubs including Green Velvet Boxwoods.  You can see the plan here in this post from October 2017 .  Here's a look at that portion of the plan : The plan called for four Green Velvet Boxwood plants.  You can see in the photo at the top of this post that we indeed, planted four of them.  I ended up staggering them a little differently than the plan called for, but they're mostly in the same spot.  The reason for clustering them more closely to the window well is to fit in a spot for our grill.  This [ Garden Diary ] post can be found in the feed over on Hornbeam Hill .  This post is to talk about shaping of these boxwoods.  We have a set of these in our front yard beds directly in front of our porch that you can see in this post that we're trying to let grow a bit.  I'd like them to get larger, but the ones in back?

This is a photo I took from my cab one early morning that shows off some very large street trees in Tokyo that have been heavily pruned.  I've posted about street trees like this before here .  But, if you look closely behind those larger parkway or street trees, you'll see some smaller, very thin conifer trees that have been trained or pruned to be long and leggy in the style of the larger spruce/pine trees that I saw in the Imperial Gardens.  Remember that photo of a beautiful tree that I posted from outside the Peninsula Hotel ?  I think these little trees might be on their way towards something like that one:  a big, strong singular trunk that can be wired to create some of that curvature and longer limbs with needles clustered on their tips.  Scroll down on this post from my last trip to Tokyo where I visited the Imperial Gardens and you can see more of these mature conifer trees. #8 on my 2019 Garden To-Do List is to plant more conifers .  I know I want to look at

On a recent Sunday morning, the kids and I found ourselves out at Forest Glen Park in Woodridge.  It is right on 75th street and we've driven by it hundreds of times on our way to Nat's folks house over the years, but we've never stopped.  The park has a couple of tennis courts facing 75th Street, but tucked in right behind the courts is a nice playground setup with a soft surface, a bunch of unique equipment for a variety of ages.  Our kids - who span from the upper single digits to just past potty-trained found a place to have fun.  Together.  That's pretty nice. But, the park also has some nice plants (or what appeared to be nice plants since Spring hadn't quite emerged when we arrived) and a neat-looking fountain and/or pond.  You can see the size/scale of the fountain in the photo at the top.  Of note, the fountain is totally out of the ground and at a perfect kid height of like 30" tall.  I call it a fountain/pond because it is kind of a linear pon