Planting what you told me to!

This was your idea. No really, this was the genius idea of many commenters on a recent garden stroll video and you totally saved my bacon. Allow me to explain. Behind me is where I had been growing three dwarf Alberta spruces since 2018 when I planted them kind of in a hurry because I was desperate for a tree and it was pretty much all I could find that was in the Listen, I'm not a fan of the dwarf Alberta spruce. If you do like them, that's great. You should grow them. I just personally don't care for them. Not because they don't look good. It's just that they rarely look good for long and that is the situation that I fell into here. So this is sort of an entry garden and this is a garden that I planted for two reasons. One, to have something pretty at the end of our driveway so it didn't look like just weeds and garbage at the end of driveway, but also to provide a little bit of screening from the road looking this way and neighbors across the road. And it started with only four different plants and now we're down to, well we were, down to three. And those plants are two Pagoda dogwoods. That's Cornus alternifolia. That is a native dogwood tree here. It's lovely. I love it. One is doing better than the other, but I hope they both just continue to thrive here. Behind that I had the Alberta spruces because we needed more evergreen screening behind that. So those were planted in a berm on kind of the back side of it. And underneath this, this was all under-planted with Hechelonichloa macra. That's just the straight species, green one, which for me gets quite tall, three and a half feet, maybe even more sometimes. And originally there had been some boxwoods in here. The boxwoods that were in this garden are the ones that had blight. And so those five were removed. There's a whole bunch of videos on the channel about blight if you're interested in that and how I figured it out. It was, if I recall, only like the, it was one of the first cases positively identified in the landscape in Wisconsin. Anyway, the boxwoods got the hook and by the way, there has been no other cases of blight on the property since I did that. So this is only Hechelonichloa macra. It turns out I didn't need those boxwoods anyway. But over those eight years, those dwarf Alberta spruces did okay for a while. And then they started looking kind of like rubbish. There was a lot of dead at the bottom. The dead at the bottom was probably caused by two things. One, little, it's a little, it's not full sun, right? So I think they would prefer a full sun area. They can tolerate some shade, which is why I picked them originally. They also probably went into the last two winters dry. And I think that's what did them in. I think those trees just cannot stand any dryness. They are also quite prone to mites. I saw no sign of mite damage, so I don't think that was my issue. But at the end of the day, even if they had been super healthy, still didn't really like them. So I've been cooking up a plan to remove those for a few years now. And this year, I actually got three Chamaecyparis obtusa, which is Hinoki cypress, from Eisley with the intention of replacing them. And then they came, and although this is a faster, it was Confucius, was the cultivar. And although Confucius is known to grow a little bit faster than others, when they came, I thought, wow, we are giving up a lot of height. So as I talked about in a recent garden tour, I tried first pruning, lollipopping, ate one of those dwarf vertebrate spruces, just to make sure that I ruled that option out. And boy, did I rule it out. Oh, I absolutely hated it. And so I shared on that garden stroll, a little bit of my struggle, just saying this was where I was at, and I wasn't quite sure what to do. But I was pretty sure those dwarf vertebrate spruces were going. Well, a number of people made some suggestions about what I could plant there other than those Chamaecyparis. But one of the suggested plants to put there that came up maybe five times was Hemlock. And the first time I read that, I went, duh, why am I not thinking about that? So Eastern Hemlocks, that's Suya, I think that's how you pronounce it, Suya canadensis, is actually a native tree to this area, and actually to much of the northeastern United States. Actually is one of those evergreens that actually does quite well in a shady spot. And this is just one of those weird spots, it faces west. It shouldn't really be shady, but there's some trees across the way, so sometimes it's quite bright, and sometimes it's a little bit shady. It's in no way full sun, particularly behind these Pagoda Dogwoods. And I feel like maybe I actually had this thought of Hemlock at one point and just sort of forgot about it. But in any case, all of the credit for this goes to you guys, you wonderful viewers who share great ideas, because that is exactly what I did. I immediately went out and hunted down these Hemlocks. So the ones I got are Golden Splendor. They do have kind of a yellow color to them. We'll see how much yellow they actually develop. I think the yellow is better in more sun, so we'll see how much yellow they get. I would expect that the roadside will be yellower than the house side, but we'll see. And Golden Splendor is actually one of those cultivars that is, I think, mostly or maybe only grown by Eisley. So while Eisley was nice enough to send me a whole bunch of plants this year, these aren't some of them. These I went out and bought and I actually went on to Eisley's website. I did their garden center finder, went in there, found two garden centers that I frequent that are near me, both of whom publish their plant lists or plant inventory online. And there is a special place in heaven for garden centers who do that because it is so nice to know what they have. The first one I looked at, they were listed as having them and they list theirs as like the size of the plant, 15 inches. Well, I'm not going to do 15 inches. So then I went to the second one and they don't list height, they list container size and they said number six containers, which is a pretty sizable container. And so this morning I went and I picked up the last three of these that they had. This one in particular is showing off that golden color a little bit, a little bit more. Although the new growth is always a little bit lighter and brighter. I think on pretty much ever any evergreen. And you can see these are looking a little and you can see that these are looking a little rangy and I'm going to talk about. And you can see that these are looking a little sparse and a little rangy, but this is a fast grower. This one grows, they say, 15 to 18 inches a year, which is crazy, which also means that this is not a tree I can just plant and walk away. The good news is, is that hemlocks take extremely well to shearing, shaping, hedging, clipping back, doing what you want with them. There are a lot of hedges in this world, very formal hedges that are made of hemlock. That is not the plan here, by the way. But I have a lot of options of what I can do with these plants. So the first thing I think I'm gonna do with them is I'm probably going to actually do a little bit of very light pruning this year, back just a little bit, just to help promote some branching on these and get these to thicken up. Because you, this plant just looks like a tree that grows really fast, doesn't it? Like you can tell it's just like shot up. And actually what I'm going to have to do is I'm actually going to have to take this leader and stake this leader up a little bit more because it's actually growing so fast the leader is like a little bit floppy up here. In the future I can, I mean I want these obviously to be wide. In the future I'm just going to have to keep an eye out. The one thing is, is that if I'm going to prune this hard, you can't just like let it grow with reckless abandon and then one day go, okay we're going to prune you really hard now. Like you have to kind of gradually work into that. Otherwise you're going to end up by topping it and it's going to be this weird square shape and none of it's going to be pretty. All right so let me just give you the stats of Golden Splendor Canadian Hemlock. Ten year size is 15 feet. 15 feet is probably where I want these to top out, maybe even 12. Because if I'm going to have to maintain these and keep these in check from getting too tall, because we are dealing with power lines close, I don't think any of them would be right under a power line, but it's close enough to worry about it. And it actually says do not plant these under power lines, but we're close. So probably 12 feet, maybe 10 feet, whatever is the height that I can manage them over time, recognizing that I am signing up for annual maintenance on these. Hardy down to zone four. Sun to part shade. I will just read you the description that they put in here. This graceful elegant conifer grows quickly into a large golden tree with soft delicate needles and sweeping branches. Unlike other golden selections, Golden Splendor enjoys full sun and produces brighter color with more exposure. Use it as a dramatic specimen tree in a large space. Plant a row of these conifers into a golden hedge. Provide moist well-drained soil. Well-draining moist soil is the key with hemlocks. Hemlocks will never be drought resistant, so whenever we get droughty, which we actually are right now, I make sure I give supplemental water to the hemlock that we have at the end here, because they just, they're just never going to be happy in any kind of dry. They don't need a ton of water, they just don't really want to be dry, and they're never going to adapt to that. Let me show you the situation here as it stands right now. This is where the dwarf alberta spruces were. I've got this under planted with geranium macroysum. We actually were borrowing a tractor from a neighbor the day that we pulled these out, so we actually just pulled them out. I actually just tied a rope to them and pulled them out. So in this case over here, like here, we've actually peeled back. This is all geranium. I think I can flop that up and the geranium macroysum will be there. The wonderful thing about all this is that the holes have been dug for me. I think this hole down here as well is the same. Yeah, you can see that that the holes are pretty much dug. I just have to probably refine them a little bit, dig them a little bit deeper. The soil over here on this berm is actually pretty good because I created this berm almost exclusively out of wood chips. I pretty much made it out of arborist wood chips other than a little column of soil that I originally planted those dwarf alberta spruces in. All those wood chips have broken down over the years, so this is really nice soil. However, I am going to add some compost in here. I'm going to add compost to all of these holes in addition to biochar blend, which I always add to every planting hole, a little bit of it, and to the fill soil. Everything gets a little bit of biochar blend. But I've been starting to add some compost in just to help things hold on to a little bit more moisture as they're getting established. So by the way, these trees do look like the last three on the lot. One is very good, one is okay, and one is really kind of sketchy looking. I am going to plant the sketchy looking one, the most sparse kind of misshapen one, on the far end because that is the side, that is the one that gets the most sun. So this is how I do it. When I have a grouping of plants that are supposed to be the same but one is better than the other, I will plant the one that is the most in need of something in the most favorable spot because then it has the best chance of catching up with the other ones. At least that's my theory. All right, well I managed to break my mic while I was doing that so I'm just holding it now. So this is the kind of pruning I'm talking about. I'm just nipping off to a growth point, just a little bit. I mean, obviously you don't want to, generally you don't do a lot of pruning on something that's newly planted. You don't want it trying to push growth, you want it trying to make roots. However, this is a little bit painful because it's beautiful, right? And you don't really want to do this but it'll be worth it in the end. So I'm just going to nip a few things here before I miss it too much. And then you can see I'm going to have to, like I said, I'm going to have to sort of support the leader a little bit more here but I'm just going to go through right now. I've got water running on this one. I want to make sure that they all start off super well watered and then I need to get some mulch and I need to mulch them really well. And I am going to this geranium maccharism here. I'll probably, you know, just pull it out of the way where it's kind of getting in the way of the skirt so we do get a nice bottom on these. But this is the most beautiful berm situation I could ever think of. So I love it here and it's just so handy. So there you go, you guys. There's the trees that you told me to plant and you were all right. I love it. Love it so much. Couldn't be happier with this. I should just briefly address woolly adelgids. Woolly adelgids are a bug that kind of looks like fuzzy little gray balls that kind of go along the stem. They have done a pretty good job of wiping out or coming close to wiping out the native hemlock population on the east coast. We do not have, knock on wood, we do not have the woolly adelgid in Wisconsin yet. It'll probably come at some point. There's two ways you can treat it. You can either treat them with horticultural oil or you can treat the tree with a systemic insecticide that will also kill them. Hopefully I won't need to do that but I know a lot of times when I talk about hemlock people say, you know, bring those up so I thought it'd be worth mentioning. So if you're thinking about growing a hemlock it's probably worth just looking up if woolly adelgids are a problem in your area so you know if that's something you're going to have to deal with because they will kill the tree if you don't treat them in some way. Alright so I'm going to wrap this up here but here are these beautiful trees that you told me to plant. So thank you. You are very smart people. I very much appreciate it. Thanks for these. Alright you guys have a great day in your garden. You earned it. You did a good job here. We'll see you soon.