Why I Oughta...

As part of my [ garden diary ], I've been working to keep annual logs of growth on some of the trees and shrubs including my tree height inventory.  Here is the link to the 2019 tree height inventory post .   And here's the one for 2018 .  The reason I bring this up is that earlier this month, as part of doing a mid-Winter yard inventory, I posted about some Winter damage on our Flowering Cherry Tree in the backyard .  In that post , I lamented that my measurement(s) for some of the trees is becoming inaccurate because of their heights getting too tall to get a tape measure on properly.   Welp...thanks to the miracles of e-commerce shopping, I'm now the proud owner of this Digital Caliper Measurement Tool that you can see below.  This one is just $8.99 , so it isn't the most expensive or sophisticated caliper tool, but I'm thinking it will get the job done. It is pretty easy to use and came with a couple of backup batteries. As I mentioned in my '

In November of 2017 - as we approached our first Winter in our new house - I posted a photo of our heated bird bath being placed in the yard near our feeders .  At that time, I kept the feeders a little bit closer to the house.  That bird bath was originally from our old house in Elmhurst and it was a 'deck-mounted' heated bird bath.  So that meant that when I used it in Downers, I had to place it on a little table.  It didn't have a pedestal.    For Christmas that year, I was gifted a Water Wiggler to keep the water moving .   The bird bath was one of the key pieces that we needed in order to meet the criteria of being a Certified Wildlife Habitat from the National Wildlife Federation (the other criteria include three kinds of food, two types of cover/shelter and places to raise young).   The first year, I didn't see much action in the bath.   But, during the Winter of 2018/2019, we placed the heated bird bath outside again, but this time it was used pret

A couple of days ago, I posted a couple of photos of our Flowering Japanese Kwanzan Cherry Tree that had suffered a little bit of winter damage here on the blog.  Today, I'm documenting a few of our front yard trees and their buds (or lack thereof).  I wanted to capture a few of the trees and how their buds were coming along in the heart of Winter.  If you're looking for a layout of our front yard trees that is a companion of this post, you can view it here on this 'tree dreaming' post from a week ago. First up, is our small Bald Cypress.  Last I covered it here on the blog was back at the end of August of this Summer (2019) when it was showing nicely with green, lacy needles.  Today, you can see it (below) clinging to a lot of brown/orange needles on the trees small frame.   Here (below) is a closer look at one of the branches that have some thorn-like (but not thorns!) raised bark, but not what I'd consider normal 'buds'.  However, look close

With the calendar turning over to the new year soon, my mind has naturally drifted outdoors to our backyard to think about what kind of 'tree planning' we should be doing in Spring.  Right after Christmas, I posted my front yard tree succession planting plan .  And because we've been filling our bird feeder, my mind has been focused on the area you see in the photo above.  I've covered this section of yard before with this Fall of 2017 post showing the landscape plan here . Of note, what I'm showing here differs from what the plan includes, but that's because the plan doesn't call for many new trees, but instead uses the existing trees and augments them with shrubs. To set the context - or edges - of this image, you can see two trees that I've posted about before. First, in purple, on the left is the Weeping White Spruce Columnar tree . And, in red, on the far right is the Weeping Cedar tree that I planted and lost .  I've left the corpse

I was out puttering around the yard on a mild Winter day recently doing a little bit of bud inspection to see what trees had put off when I found this break in this Japanese Kwanzan Flowering Cherry Tree in the backyard.  I bought this tree in May of 2017 when it was a small (maybe .75" caliper) tree from Menards after I had just come back from my first trip to Tokyo where I saw *their* Cherry Blossom trees.  The tree (in the garden center at Menards) caught my eye because it was flowering these beautiful, puffy, almost-peony-like pink flowers . At the end of June/early July of 2017, right when we were moving into our house in Downers Grove, I got around to planting the tree in the yard .  About half-way back in the yard, on the southside of the property.  Not sure, exactly why it ended up there.  Just *felt* right at the time.  Looking at the tree now, I think it is in a good spot and the placement ended up being appropriate. The first season it was in the ground - Spring

Thanks to the fine folks who are tuning the Night Sight feature on Google's Pixel devices , I was able to capture this night sky reigning high above this mighty Wisconsin Oak Tree.  You can see some of the stars brightly lit up behind the large and wandering limbs of this old Oak Tree.  I'm certain that I could have gotten an even better photo, but it was cold at night, and I was wearing my house shoes.  So, that meant that I had to get to the edge of the porch and just *aim high*. 

Last Summer, I posted about how we were kicking off a new LEGO build of the Walt Disney World Cinderella's Castle with the kids.  In that post - dated July 9, 2018 - I mentioned that we had started the project seven days prior (July 2, 2018) and talked through how we had encountered some trouble with the early steps in the build due to lost parts.  One of the kids received this as a birthday present a year or so ago and I made the mistake of putting the big LEGO box in the room with the rest of the LEGOs at our house.  With young, curious kids around, they couldn't help themselves and opened the box to look at the parts.  That lead to opened bags and, ummm, missing parts.  From that July 2018 post : Also, Step 3 is where we already ran into trouble. Why? Because why wouldn't a seven year old who has this Castle set in her bedroom for seven months open up bag one and tinker around. The only problem? When we sat down to do it together, we had to scavenge together