My hostas are blooming right now, and the groundcover, Lamium maculatum, still has scattered blooms, but not as well as when it first bloomed in May.
I’m quite happy to see my Rocky Mountain Maple doing so well, too. This was grown from seed in 2006 and it’s just leaping in height this year!
Early Saturday morning, before dawn, our Lacebark Elm (Ulmus parvifolia) suffered a major break from some heavy wind. We’ve had wind like this many times, but there was a weak crotch where two major scaffold branches were growing in too deep of a V-shape. When branches grow with narrow crotch angles, they end up with…
We’ve had some light frosts off and on for the past few weeks, but this morning was the first serious freeze. My outside thermometer said 30 degrees this morning, and it’s usually a little high, because it gets some heat radiation from the house. The news guy said this was the first freeze of the…
We needed to create a long trellis for the raspberries this year, and we decided to DIY it, learn a little lashing technique, and use some handy leftover branches from last year’s prunings. This was especially cool, since we’re trying to spend as little money as possible during this pandemic recession! After we finished, though,…
I fertilized the lawn today. It was about a month overdue. I also sprayed Malathion on my apples and nectarines and then sprayed a small remaining amount on some flowers that had too many grasshoppers recently. Yesterday, I sprayed the rose hedge with “bloom booster” fertilizer as a foliar feeding. Those roses are actually finally…
For my birthday, I got a great Sigma 70-300mm APO DG zoom lens for my Canon digital SLR. With this digital camera, that lens is almost an 11x zoom! Pretty darn cool. It has a nice macro function that allows you to take these ultra closeups from four feet away. I’m having a lot of…
My beautiful Japanese maple in front of my house has a disease or something. I’m worried about it. This one main branch and all the smaller branches that shoot off of it are dying. It started with some leaves turning red about a month ago, and now they’ve shriveled up. Some of the smaller twigs…
Oh no. I hate to say this, but the more I look at that maple, the more I think it might actually be a box elder tree. Ugghh! I don’t want a stinking box elder tree!