Why I Oughta...

Like (almost) every previous growing season, I planted some Elephant Ear bulbs in our containers in an attempt to add a (slightly) tropical vibe to our patio.  These bulbs come from Longfield Gardens and are carried by Costco each Spring.  This year, I put a couple in both the wood box at the corner of the patio and the larger, glazed container.  And, both of them have put up leaves that are getting bigger by the day.  See below for first the wood container followed by the glazed one.  I'll monitor these for size - here's the mark to beat leaf-size-wise (from 2021) .

Last year, I let this Maple tree volunteer seedling just go .  It grew up and up and I ended up protecting it via a chicken wire ring during the Winter.    It came back this year and has put on a ton of new growth on the leader.  SO....I figured it was time to try to figure out what variety of Maple/Acer I was dealing with in the garden.  I went out and looked the foliage and then started to look around - and it was a quick Web stroll to figure out that I'm dealing with a Silver Maple.    Below are two photos of the top and bottom of the leaf - and there are two tells here.    At least...I'm about 75% confident that this is, indeed, a Silver Maple. The Chicago Botanic Garden has this listing up for Silver maple (Acer saccharinum) that details those two tells that are visible in the photos above: The silver maple is a North American native and best known for providing us with maple syrup. The leaves have the classic maple leaf shape and become brilliant yellow and red-orange in

Roses are - they say - heavy feeders.  So, I've been applying a heavy-hand of granular rose food every month this season; starting in April.   This month - July - I sprinkled a combo fertilizer and systemic pest control that you can see in the bottom photo.  Posting this to mark down this as a 'seasonal task'; per my 2023 to-do list.   Photos below show the three new, bareroot roses with fertilizer at their feet. These three don't seem to have been infected with the same pest as the ones on the side, but I figure I can inoculate them a bit with this systemic treatment. 

Before we left town in June, I planted a pair of new (to me) Oakleaf Hydrangeas - Snow Queen - along the fence in an attempt to extend/continue that run of Oakleaf Hydranges along that bed .  These are interplanted with some evergreens - Green Giant Thujas.  When I planted these, I followed Ralph Snodsmith's advice and gave these "Five Dollar Holes" along with a heavy dose of municipal biosolids to get them started.    I set up irrigation for the couple of weeks post-planting for these flowering shrubs and I'm very surprised at how much growth they appear to have put on in such a short time.  See below for a photo showing the pair of shrub as they stand now.  Flip back here .  Very different in a short period of time, right?  I'll plan on protecting these with chicken wire this Fall/Winter and hopefully...we'll see some blooms next year.  

Number four on my 2023 to-do list was to 'get (more) serious with vegetables'.   And, despite not really posting about it, I think we've (sort-of) done that - by planting up a Greenstalk vertical container garden.  This Spring, I filled it out with a mix of herbs and vegetables (fruits) and we're seeing some of them set fruit right now.  We harvested these strawberries from the Greenstalk .  Below are a few signs of the tomatoes that we planted in the bottom row of the Greenstalk - the Red Robin dwarf plant from the Morton Sale and both a Rutgers Heirloom and a Roma Paste from the orange big box store.  What was the reason for these three?  They're all DETERMINATE tomatoes.   Which means...they grow to a specific size and stop.  Other, vining tomatoes can just.keep,growing.  Since this is a container-situation, I figured determinate varieties were the right choice.   Also, these are tomatoes that are known to be slicers/eaters/canners.  What kind of growth are we

Back in Spring of 2021, I planted some new (to me) bareroot purple Astilbes from Longfield Gardens after bringing them home from Costco - sort-of...on a whim.  Where I put them (on the northside, under the large flowering pear) ended up being too crowded.  Which lead me to attempting to dig some of them out and transplanting them last Fall .  I dug out three of them and tucked them in behind the red-bloomed Fanal Astilbes on the southside.  My thinking (then) was that if the Fanal Astilbes were happy here (and...from what I understand, Astilbes have a reputation for being finicky and hard to get established), the purple ones would like it over there, too.   I pretty much forgot about them as the foliage is pretty similar to the Fanal variety, so before they bloomed, they all.looked.the.same. In the photo below, you can see the three Gloria Purpureas that are purple in color.   The Fanal blooms are spent, but the purple blooms are just getting started.  A nice sort-of sequential bloomi

In Spring of 2021, I planted eight bareroot Bressingham Blue Hostas from Longfield Gardens along the edge of a new curve in one of our backyard beds .   The plan called for these to be 'Hadpsen Hostas', but I found and admired the Bressingham Blue variety, so I made the swap.   One year post-planting, seven-of-the-eight came back and were putting on their trademark blueish-green foliage.  This is what the Bressingham Blue hostas looked like in late May 2022 .  Started with eight.  By May 2022, there were seven.  Not bad. How about today?  See below for a photo showing these hostas.  The two in the 'back row' are still there. But, at first glance, it seems that there are (now) just four in the front row.   But, if you look closer, there are (strangely) two very TINY tucked in there.  The first tiny one is in the open gap - what becomes the 'second' from the left.  Below is annotated (and zoomed) version of the same photo: And the other tiny one is all the way to