Why I Oughta...

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 1971-just before our restau

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 going

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 brown.  April...even more brown.  You can see it

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

A couple of weeks ago, I brought home a three Gold Cone Junipers from Menards and shared photos and details from them here .  I ended up getting two of them in the ground this week and have the third still in the cast iron urn in our front yard.  Above you'll see one in the ground and the other one is kind of staggered behind it. These are generally in the vicinity of where I planted the small Hemlock last year (that died!) and should serve as a nice multi-layered look of conifers once I get the Hemlocks in the ground.    This is an area that gets plenty of morning sun and since it is on the northside of the property, it gets some decent oblique sun throughout most of the day until about 2 or 3 pm in the afternoon. The Gold Cone Juniper is a columnar conifer that is billed - per the tag - to only be four to five feet tall, but there are a few photos on the Web that show something more on the order of eight to ten feet tall?  I'll be happy with cute little four feet tall

We've been composting in our yard since 2009 when we bought a Lifetime Compost Tumbler from Costco .    We've been filling it each Fall since (except for the two seasons we lived in Equation Boy/Man's house in Elmhurst) and by late Summer, we have a nice batch of black gold.  In the ten years that I've been composting, I've learned that composting is a 'batch process'.  Meaning....you have to build up a full 'batch', get the right mix of nitrogen and carbon and then wait for it to cook. That 'batch process' I'm talking about is the big part of why our current setup (with a single large tumbler) isn't working hard enough for us.  What we currently do is during the Spring cleanup and all through the early part of the Summer, I collect material and just kind of pile it up next to the tumbler.  Why?  Why not *in* the tumbler?  Because it is still FULL from the previous batch. About June or so, after we've had six or more weeks