The perfect planting mix

Every tree, shrub or flower we plant in our yard gets "the treatment". It is a very simple mix of soil amendments that works quite well and I would like to share it with you.

In our wheelbarrow, I mix 1 bag of store-bought topsoil, 1/2 bag of store-bought manure and several shovel fulls of peat moss.

Mix this well in the wheelbarrow. After I have dug the hole to the proper depth and width, I lay in some of the mixture, place the tree, shrub or plant into the hole and proceed to fill the area around with the mixture. Sometimes I will either mix in the soil that came out of the hole, or add it as a top dressing. Mulch with either mulch or leaves or pine needles and water well. Remember to keep watering for a couple of weeks after planting.

We just added 3 new Japanese maples to our collection. They were purchased at Southern States during a great sale they had this summer.  Right after we bought them, the weather turned real dry and hot, so I put off planting them until last week. I kept them in dappled shade and watered them well during this time.

Next spring we should have some nice new buds on these fine specimens. The color of the leaves this fall was very promising. They were Acer Shiraswanum Palmatifolium, Acer Palmatum Purple Ghost, and Acer Palmatum Full Moon.

To mulch, or not to mulch. That is the question.

Every year I see hundreds, no thousands of people raking, bagging, blowing huge piles of leaves frustratingly with a small electric blower, filling huge tarps with leaves, only to put them in bags, ready to go to the landfill. Really?

The plastic bags alone will not decompose for 1000 years. You use paper bags? Really? I'm not going down that path. There are  a few ways you can save the planet and still have a nice yard, in fact a better yard, and I will try to share my thoughts on the matter.

First, you don't have to have that yard that looks like you have a full time staff of groundskeepers. I tried that a few years ago. I would get angry when leaves fell on my newly raked yard, curse when the neighbors (who never seems to clean his yard) leaves would blow into my nice clean yard. Clean? Yes. Spotless? No. Ain't gonna happen Mr. Gates.

What are leaves anyway? I see free fertilizer! So I compost just about all of my leaves. In the first part of the season as the leaves are falling as they are now(see pic above), I lower my mower deck, and mulch the hell out of them. Most of the time you can't even tell there were leaves on the lawn. The only thing that throws the mulching mower for a loop are pine needles, but it still cuts them up and eventually they will break down faster this way.

Why not leave them there and do nothing? Well, for one thing it looks like no one lives there. If you leave the leaves and debris on the ground, they get wet, mat up and cut off water, air and sunlight to the ground. They will eventually break down, but it will take a long time, and everything under them will die. When you mulch, you are increasing the surface area of the leaf exponentially therefore giving more area for air and water and bugs and whatnot to break it down. It also reduces the "pile" by 2/3's. See pic below.

After most of the leaves have fallen, and most of my neighbors have joined my collection, I will start to clean out the beds. I do blow these out, into the yard, where I mulch them there. Some are blown down to the back of the yard where they will join the compost pile. The yard loves it and I save on chemicals, time, energy etc.

Autumnal feelings

'Tis the time once again where everything must die or go dormant. The bursts of color are in some ways pleasing and others, sad. The bright colors signal the end of the growing season and are a joy to witness. On the other hand, for those of us that enjoy working in the yard, growing things from seed, bringing things to life, it is rather sad. Three to four months of cold hard weather are ahead, here in Virginia we don't really get the hardest of the winter weather until February, which in its self, is good I guess, meaning that we only have 1.5 months of truly cold, harsh weather.

Walking around the yard yesterday, I was able to snap these pics, and some are from last year. The colors are more vibrant when the sun is shining and coming through the golden or orange leaves. The Ginko has yet to color its usual solid yellow color. The trees downtown have already dropped near my sons apartment. I guess ours will burst forth in a few days, giving us the fleeting glimpse of bright yellow leaves, leaving almost as fast as they appear.

The seasonal work has yet to be performed, clipping all of the growth that will soon be dead on the Gladiolas and the Ginger Lilies, adding some mulch over some of the tuberous rooted plants so, if we have bitter cold weather, the plants will survive for next year. I don't rake. I blow the leaves out of the bushes and from around the house and mulch all of it with the lawn mower. It saves on the amount of fertilizer I use and the lawn loves it. No bags of leaves to the landfill where they will probably last for 100 years.

There are still a few plants to be planted, namely three Japanese Maples purchased over the summer. It got too hot and dry to plant them after we got them, so I left them in their pots and kept them in a semi-shady place and watered them well. They have great color and should do just fine come spring.