Why I Oughta...

Yesterday, I posted a photo of the Youngstown Juniper that I bought at Home Depot to work into a bonsai tree and mentioned that I also picked up another tree.  Here's that tree:  A Chinese Juniper 'Pfitzeriana Aurea'.  Same deal:  from Home Depot in Darien in a #1 pot that cost less than $10.  Above you can see the tree that includes some gold-ish needles in the new growth.  Below, you can see a close-up of the tag. This will be a tree that I'll work on in a similar fashion to the Youngstown Juniper.  I'm aware that since these things are so small that the trunks are very thin - and it is going to take a LONG time to work this into anything substantial.  But...it is a cheap way for me to work on some pruning techniques, right? This will make three nursery stock trees that I've started.  I also have identified a tree on our property - it is a cut-down of one of the American Elms that the U of I Master Gardener identified - that I am going to try to ha

In the photo you see above, you'll see a large "vase" (at least that what I'm calling them for now) of Ostrich Ferns and if you look at the bottom of the photo, you'll see a smaller, second Ostrich Fern in the foreground.  The one at the top is what I've been calling the "Teardown Fern".  Here's a post showing this same Ostrich Fern a year ago in June of 2018 .    The top photo in *that* post is from when it was just un-furling and the photo at the bottom of that the post is what it looked like in mid-June.  Here's the original post when I pulled them out of our neighbor's yard in October of 2017 .  Hence...the whole " Teardown Fern " moniker.  This year, you can see that it has more fronds and is larger.  But...that's not the most important part.  That's the second fern that has popped up.  This thing has multiplied.    How nice.  These things do, indeed, multiply and I'm glad that it has matured enough to

This is now official the 33rd tree that we've planted into our lot since we've moved in:  the Weeping White Spruce.  I covered the details of this tree in a post here .  Today, I'm marking the planting of this tree with a post in the tree diary.   This is the eighth conifer with one going in last year ( Weeping Cedar ) and six going in this year ( Canadian Hemlocks part 1 here and part 2 here ).  This is the second weeping evergreen and it seems that I have a soft-spot for weeping trees. A few days ago, I posted about how I moved some tulip bulbs out of the way and further from the fence to make room for this tree.  If you read the original Weeping White Spruce post, you know that this thing gets tall and skinny .  It will only get about four feet wide at the base, so I was able to put this pretty close to the fence.  Below, you can see the recently relocated tulips and this new tree. And to provide a little bit of further context in terms of placement, here

A couple of weeks ago, I posted some photos of the newly bloomed tulips that came up in our front yard bed right in front of the large Maple tree.  Go see that photo here .  They look - to me at least - to be orange and red.  I say that because the reds were *supposed* to be pink, but they came out much more like a true red.  They looked great.  Or at least I thought they did.  That was, until I came across this ebook from Pretty Purple Door .  It is called " 7 questions to ask yourself to choose the right plants for your garden " and you can get it by giving her your name and email address here on her site .  I'm not going to link directly to the .pdf because she is running a biz, but I do want to show one little nugget that is in that guide.  She talks about color palette and then lists a few of her favorites and a few to avoid.  To be respectful, here's a screenshot, but I've blurred out the parts that aren't relevant here.  (Again...if you want the fu

Number one on my 2019 Gardening To-Do Addendum List was to relocate some of my Fall bulbs.  It didn't make my main To-do list for the year, but the two kind of go together.  Why's that?  Because #8 on the main To-Do list is to add some conifers to the backyard.    My thinking was that if I move these tulips from back against the fenceline, I can replace them with the Weeping White Spruce that I bought and move these closer to the front of the bed.    Here's what these same tulips looked like earlier this Spring .  I started to dig them and realized that moving blooming tulips is not for the faint of heart.  I dug deep and tried to pull out the bulbs and the ground with them.  Then, I poked around and tried to remove whatever weeds that had glom'd on to the bulbs and stuck them back in the ground.  Everything I've read about Tulips suggests that people often cut off the tulip leaves far too early because once the flower blooms, they figure that they should

Back at the beginning of May, I posted a photo that showed three of the six Canadian Hemlock tiny trees that I bought with a credit from an online nursery .  These things are tiny.   The official name is Tsuga canadensis . Sometimes they're called Canadian Hemlocks. Sometimes Eastern Hemlocks. Maybe 16" tall.  I mentioned in the post that I put the first three in the far back reaches of our yard and that I was planning on putting the other three on the northside. These aren't the first Hemlocks that I've planted, unfortunately.  I bought a tiny one just like these at Menards on a whim and put it in the ground last Summer.  By September, it was gone .  Done.  Not sure what happened to it, but I also lost our little Fraser Fir at the same time .  Guessing it was neglect via limited water? The three trees that are in this post (circled in green in the photo above) are the same trees that are specified in the landscape plan portion that I posted about in June of

Back on May 7th of this year, I shared a couple of photos and talked about my initial excitement of giving the art of bonsai a shot with a piece of nursery stock that I picked up at Home Depot for $10 .  It is a Cypress Hinoki and had one large(ish) trunk that seemed to have decent trunk taper, very little reverse taper and priced so cheaply that if I killed the poor thing, I wouldn't be that upset. In that initial post, I talked about how I was following some of the Mirai Bonsai Basics video directions and started with the roots and trunk.  More recently, I moved on to the next few steps and began to try to prune the Cypress into a bonsai of sorts. I know that every article you read talks about how you aren't supposed to prune more than 30% of the tree at any one time and that pruning an evergreen like this Cypress is best done in the late fall when it the tree is heading to dormancy.  But, I couldn't, umm, help myself.  I dove right in. I began by pruning off