Why I Oughta...

There we were...wandering around the Garden Show at Wannemaker's earlier this month when I was smacked with a burst of color.  The lure of color and vibrancy is almost too much.  Not to mention that Nat was with me and she fell in love with some color and picked out a new (to me) flower and put it in our cart.  What caught her eye?  See below for a peek at a purple/blue flower: At the show, there were various growers with little 'booths' or setups - the one that we were most drawn-to was from Elite Growers in Volo .  Here's the Elite Growers booth below.   But....come on.  It is mid-March.   All logic went out the window.  That's what happens when you go plant shopping without a plan.   What did we get?  A set of Primrose.  Primula belarina 'Blue Champion'.  See below for the plant tag: Primrose are not - nor have *ever* been on my radar.  But, now they're going to be in our garden.  That tag talks about location - part shade and how they need to be wate

With the flip last week on Daylight Savings Time, it means that I now get a little bit of post-work garden time.  It isn't dark when I close my laptop, so that's kinda nice.  With the calendar being mid-March, I'm now trying to find garden tasks that I can take on while balancing the guidance of *not doing too much cleanup* too early.  One of the tasks that I decided to do this past week was a look at some cleanup in the front yard - including pruning some of my hydrangeas.   In past years, I have done what I'll call a 'light' pruning - lop'ing off the thin branching, but mostly leaving about 2/3rds of the shrub intact.  After watching some YouTube videos and working up the courage to go at them pretty hard, I decided to give theses a harder prune this late Winter. First up, the pair of (larger) Limelight Hydrangeas on the side of our front porch.  Here's what they look like right before pruning - all of the flower heads still attached (photo below) with

Back a few years, my sister gifted me a clump of purple bearded (I think) Iris that came out of her (and...for a couple of years...MY) neighbor's garden . His name was Wes and he had a couple of rows of Irises that lined his driveway.  Wes and his wife moved away and his house was torn down for a McMansion to go up on the property.  But, before the bulldozers arrived, Vic dug up some of the Irises.  I planted them on the side of our house and they flowered that first season .   Last Spring - in early April - I posted a walkabout that showed early foliage including these Iris tips .  Looks like these are about three weeks ahead of 2022.  See below for the tips: Wes' garden might be gone.  And, we might have moved off of Indiana Street.  But, with this plant, I can say that little bit of Indiana Street (and Wes' garden) are alive and well over here in Downers. 

The weather is showing snow this week, but that doesn't mean Spring isn't already here in the mind of a gardener.   Between the tulip foliage emerging and my first bloom via a Snow Crocus , you can't blame a plantsman for thinking that the time for planting is near.  And, the inventory folks at the Orange Big Box store nursery think the same thing.   I was on a quick run to the hardware store when I noticed two things;  first...the parking lot nursery wasn't quite set up.  But...they did put out a couple of shopping carts turned over on their side to sort of 'mark' the boundaries of where they're going to build their nursery - in an attempt to keep cars out of there.  And...when you walk up to the entrance, you can see the nursery tables set up on either side of the main entrance and all the way down to the garden center.   Second thing of note:  they have some early trees in their inventory along the sidewalk.  Of course, I couldn't help myself and had

On Monday, I posted a series of photos showing how I had used my post-hole digger to excavate holes - getting into the clay layer below my topsoil - in our front porch bed.  I ended up with more than a dozen of them in various spots around the bed including up front.  My goal was to help improve the soil conditions, break up that bathtub effect and try to make the area a little bit more hospitable to plants and roots .   I called it 'vertical mulching' in Monday's post, but today is a little bit more about that process and how I filled the holes. I recently removed the chicken-wire rings around our Disneyland Roses to prepare them for Spring.  In each of those three rings was a heavy bed of mulched-up leaves that I collected last year.  Since Fall, there had been a tiny bit of decomposition, but A LOT of the leaves that I used to protect the roses were Oak leaves and those are VERY.SLOW to decompose.  So, I went over to the roses and filled up my trug with some leaf litter

I've put down (right around) 36 gallons of biosolids on the two sections of our parkway to date - using 5 gallon buckets and spreading it with a rake to top-dress the turf.  This past weekend, I grabbed twelve more gallons (making it 48 total gallons of the stuff) across both sections.  First (below) is the little parkway island that sits IB2DWs.  Then, I went on the other side of the Norway Maple tree in the parkway and dumped some biosolids in between the tree ring and the property line (below): And, I also went back and filled in some of the spots that looked like they could se some help (below): And...finally, below you can see that I also introduced a little bit to the main lawn - right along the sidewalk.  There is a slight void - a few inches in from the sidewalk - that has settled.   I'm going to keep trying to go - and get 12 gallons at a time - to continue to top dress the lawn this Spring - even bringing some of it to the backyard to help in that part of the lawn tha

How old are our pair of Greenspire Linden trees that are in our yard? I'm NOT sure.  But, I know that we have them in our yard for  (coming up on) six full years - and this will be our seventh growing season.  Planted in the Summer of 2017, the have grown into their own across those six growing seasons.    The last time I showed these trees was in October when they were putting on a fall show with orange and yellow foliage .   This past September, I documented via caliper sizing the overall growth of these trees:  they are both greater than 3" calipers now.  They went from a little bit over 1.5" to more than 3" - doubling in size since 2020.   My plan for this year is to plant underneath these and remove the frames.  But, before I do that, I went out this weekend and began to prune some of the tops of these trees.  That top layer of the espalier is thick and full of new growth.  What kind of growth?  What would appear to be something like a waterspout that sends s