FRIDAY FINDS

It's Friday Finds time, something I haven't had time to do for a couple weeks. I'm a little behind on my blog reading as well with craziness in the garden, at work and in life. All good stuff, just busy. I wouldn't have it any other way.

How about a pretty picture to start? The 'Coralburst' crabapple we planted last year is doing great and putting on a beautiful show. When our dog Hudson died we planted a Picea glauca 'Hudsonii' for him and Mr. Much More Patient decided we should plant a tree for our dog Rita while she was still with it so she could enjoy it too. We couldn't find a tree with Rita in the name so we opted for something pretty and girly instead. We've taken her picture by it while it's in bloom the last two years and I hope we'll have many more photos like that.

Although the area around the tree is mulched, that whole area is getting really weedy. The weed torch will be making an appearance this weekend too.

The weather has been wonderful here so most of this week's finds are all about summer. Bring it on!

I like to drink cocktails and experiment a bit in summer. Last summer I perfected a real dacquiri (not the sugary fruit laden variety but simple, crisp and limey). This gimlet sounds pretty good.

Are you using a spiralizer? Tell me if it's worth it. I hate to have kitchen gadgets everywhere so if I'm going to use them, they have to be something that's worth the space.

If you're into white gardens (as I predicted many people would be in my Garden Trends for 2016), here are some very pretty ones.

You'll notice a new addition to the sidebar over there ------------>
I've created a very small Amazon shop featuring some of my favorite gardening gear. Honestly it's as much to help me find the things I buy frequently as anything else. Some of it is flashy and some is rather mundane (garden twist ties, for instance), but once I find something I like I tend to stick with it. Those are affiliate links which means I may get a percentage back if you buy something. That helps me buy plants to tell you about! ;)

I enjoy this blog because you never know what you're going to read about. It might be tiling a bathroom, digging a fence post hole or chickens. It's just a cool chick doing cool stuff, mostly on her own.

That's it folks. There is SO MUCH TO DO this weekend! I have to finish up container planting, oodles of work in the garden, find homes for all the plants (I can't keep up with the watering anymore so stuff needs to get in the ground), sailing, my nephew's high school graduation and so much more. What's on your agenda this weekend?

A FEW NEW TREES

Don't forget this is the week of all my favorite giveaways. Click here to for the soil knife giveaway and here for the Perfect Garden Hose.

..............................................................

I garden in cycles. Every couple years, I create a new garden area (i.e. last year I redid the back yard), which is a ton of work, and then the next year I think to myself, "Oh I'll just do maintenance this year." What really ends up happening is that I just seem to buy with somewhat reckless abandon because I don't have a specific plan or "budget" (that word is always in quotes when it relates to my garden) to guide me.

From afar, the columnar apple looks like a big stick, but up close there are signs of life to come.

In addition to the ridiculous number of dahlias I bought over winter, many of which are currently in pots in my house as I wait for them to sprout, I also went a little tree crazy at the nursery a couple weekends ago. I brought home one tree that fit in my car: a columnar apple. This replaces a sickly 'Fine Line' Buckthorn that suffered the fate of living in shade for too long and it just couldn't recuperate. By the way, I love the idea of planting small fruit trees right in the middle of an ornamental garden because I think they are beautiful. An apple blossom might be the most romantic flower in the world.

That's what the fringe tree looked like when we planted it back in 2011.

And here it is now in it's new location, looking quite shrimpy with the big beech in the background.

The fringe tree off the deck has been moved. It can't say I didn't warn it. Because I did. Of all the small trees in our yard, that one takes center stage because of its proximity to the deck and prominence in the back yard. I planted it four years ago and I feel like I've been more than a little patient with it. Sure, it's grown a little, but it's still sort of spindly. Worse, it gives me approximately two lame flowers a year and I've not seen any sign of that number getting larger over the years. Sorry, fringe tree, you're going to have to put on a better show than that if you want that coveted spot.

Yes, part of this is my impatience coming through, but more and more, I just don't have a lot of hope for this tree. But it's not the end of the road for the fringe tree. He (or she, and that may be part of the problem as far as the flowering goes) has been moved to a lovely little spot by the creek, which is actually sunny now, thanks to the removal of a couple of very large trees last year.

With luck, we will see a few flowers on 'Ann' this year.

In its place is Ann. Magnolia 'Ann,' that is. She's part of the "Little Girl" series of magnolias that stay quite compact but put on the kind of show you'd expect from a magnolia. They do tend to be a little shrubby, which is not what I'm looking for in that spot, but I was able to find a tree-form 'Ann' that will allow the canopy to hover a few feet off the ground. Truth be told, I really wanted 'Jane,' which has pink blossoms that open to white, but it wasn't available in the tree form and I felt that was more important.

It's sort of fugly, but perhaps 'Ann' will grow into herself. The green stake was temporarily holding the clematis that had been growing up the fringe tree. I had to carefully untangle it from the fringe tree and temporarily tied it to the stake and then reattach it to the new magnolia.

I will admit, when I got this tree home I wondered what I was thinking when I chose it (honestly, I was exhausted and they only had two left to choose from). It doesn't have great shape (it has almost no branches on one side), but once you've borrowed a truck to drag a tree home via a one-hour drive, you're pretty much planting that sucker. Four years from now we might be in the same place, but for now I'm giving it a chance and hoping for the best.

We also added a crabapple, again in the newly sunny area made possible by the removal of diseased or damaged trees last year. Not only will it offer some additional screening from our neighbors to the north, it will be a perfect focal point from our living room window.

To be honest, crabapples scare me a little. Is there any other tree more well-known for its disease problems? And for every gorgeous crabapple I've seen, I can think of two that look terrible and are badly in need of a restorative pruning. I started my search for the right tree by looking for disease resistance and size. I also didn't want one that would get too horizontal.

It looks like very little so far, but hopefully it will become a star in the yard.

I'm fortunate to have an excellent tree nursery near me that has great information online. In their plant reference guide they have a chart on crabapples and I used it to narrow down my choices to two: 'Coralburst' and 'Royal Raindrops,' both of which have excellent disease resistance. Ultimately we went with 'Coralburst' just because we liked the flower color better.

All of the trees are planted and none of them look like anything yet because they've yet to flower or leaf out, which is why the pictures (admittedly hastily taken early in the morning), but I'm hoping the early-season move will ultimately be beneficial to them by shocking them less by the move.

And it's nice to have it done. It's always fun to get a tree, but planting a tree is a chore.