Why I Oughta...

We have an easement behind our property that buffers us from the neighbors to the West.  In that easement we keep our 3-bin compost setup and left most of the rest of it to 'go natural'.  The easement runs the entire block and connects the big pond on the south of our neighborhood to territories to the north, so we've seen critters of all types using the easement to navigate. Recently, our neighbors to the West decided to clean up the easement - and it seems that the folks that they hired to clean the place up also worked our side.  They removed a lot of Buckthorn, trimmed up some of the more valuable trees (think Maples and Walnuts) and picked up a bunch of debris that has appeared over the years. They also uncovered a bunch of stones and pavers.  And, (lucky for us) stacked a whole bunch of them up right outside our fence gate.  There are flagstones of various sizes, but also five round pavers and eight square pavers.  These have 'pebbles' embedded in the

It isn't super easy to glean from the photo above, but that is our Dawn Redwood tree that seems to be doing well - again - this Summer.  The last time I shared a photo of this tree was last Fall when it was starting to turn colors and was beginning to drop some needles. This tree grew three feet of height last Summer and built out quite a bit of new branching , so I had been hoping that we'd see another good season.  And, so far?  It seems to be doing ok.  I've run a soaker hose on some of the plants in this bed, including this Dawn Redwood - to make sure that it gets enough water. I left the spade shovel in the ground next to this tree - that's a five-foot-tall shovel and gives you a sense for the height of the tree as it stands now.  I'm NOT seeing a new three-foot-tall top on the tree right now, but there *is* some new growth on the leader (or...if you will... the apical meristem).  Below is a photo of the leader.  Can you see it? Here's an annot

Back in the end of June, I planted eight additional Summer Beauty Ornament Onion (allium) on the south side of our property in the bed that runs from east to west.  We picked them up (or...had someone picked them up) from Hinsdale Nursery and I put seven of them in a staggered planting.  When they went in, they were just green foliage, but today - if you look at the photo at the top of this post - you'll notice that they're all flowering some lovely purple sphere-shaped flowers.  Each of them have multiple flowers, but ALL of them are leaning to the East.  Looking at this photo, one thing that I'm noticing is that the mulch that I put down (delivered in mid-April this year) has already broken down quite a bit.  This area - and these Allium could use a mulch refresh.  That leads me to ask a question:  do gardeners mulch twice a year?  This post recommends both a Spring and Fall mulch ?  You should add mulch whenever layers thin out for any reason. You’ll also want

A couple of weeks ago, I bought a Shadowlands Empress Wu hosta from Home Depot and didn't really have a plan for where to put it in the garden.  It was small (1 gallon nursery pot) and inexpensive ($4.99), and I knew that it was a 'large' hosta, so I grabbed it and figured I'd sort the location later.  After keeping it in the shade and keeping it watered for a while, last week, I decided to plant it in the front yard bed - out front of the large Maple tree.  That's it in the photo above - the second from the left - in a series of hostas.  When we did our initial planting, the guys at Green Grass planted three hostas and while they've survived, I don't think that they've thrived here.   Why? I'm thinking that is because they're competing for resources with the tree?  That...or they are a miniature hosta variety.  Planted it between a couple of them and a little bit further back - closer to the tree.  If you read that original post on the S

This is the third in a series of posts about my attempt to recreate some twinkling lights that used to be inside of Disney Parks (and...I think are still at Downtown Disney/Disney Springs).  While this project has come together in the past few weeks, this has been something that I've been thinking about for a number of years.  For background, here's the outline of the idea from last week .  Then, a couple of days ago, I posted about the bulbs and the specific fixtures that I'm using .  Now that I had the bulbs and the fixtures, I wanted to see if I could figure a way to get them going without making the investment in the larger, outdoor transformer, the run of low-voltage wire and the waterproof connections.  I wanted to see if I could get them to power up and to see how "random" they actually were. Each of the bulbs are 4 watts.  And they run on 12v power.  I went to the Google machine and searched to see what my Lionel transformers were running at power-wi

This isn't a net new entry to the [ bird visitor log ] here on the blog as I've already documented the Blue Jay in March of 2019 here .  But, I spotted this beauty the other day hanging out by the feeders and he was showing off his blue feathers for a minute or two.  I snapped the photo above (and below) with my phone real quick before he flew off.   Above, he's showing off his full colors on his back.  Below, he's facing the house. I dug around a little bit on the web and learned that Blue Jays are part of the Corvidae family - which is the same family as crows  - that we commonly call "Corvids".

A couple of days ago, I posted the first part - in a series - about my journey to replicating some twinkling lights that Disney uses (or used to use) in their parks.  In that post, I mentioned that by reading various forum posts from the past 10+ years, I came to find the bulbs and then what I thought were the right e10 miniature lamp bases. These are the bulbs that I bought - you can see a photo of the box above.  Looks vintage, doesn't it?  Bought 15 of them - just to have a few spare on hand. (NOTE:  I do NOT run any affiliate links - so I'm not making any money on sending someone to any Amazon/other seller items.  So, click away...and no need to strip out any ref?/affiliate tracking codes when you buy. ) Below, is a photo of the box and some of the bulbs - quarter on the desk for size reference. Side of the box stamped "258". And, here, below is the package of 10 lamp bases that I bought from Amazon .' Here, below, is a close-up pho