We would like to wish everyone a great 4th of July. We will be closed on Saturday to enable all of our employees to celebrate this holiday with their friends and family!
We are open from 8 am to 6 pm on Friday, July 3rd, and we’ll be back open on Sunday morning, July 5th at 10 am.
This is the time of the year when customers often ask us if it is too late to plant trees, shrubs and perennials. The short answer is a definite - NO IT’S NOT TOO LATE TO PLANT!
Success with summer plantings is easy to achieve. Trees, shrubs and perennials have the same needs whether it is spring, summer or fall, and following a few simple steps will ensure your success.
Proper planting technique, adequate but not excessive water, adequate but not excessive sunlight, and adequate but not excessive nutrients are all you need to provide your new landscape plants whether it is spring, summer, or fall. It is just as easy to do in summer as at other times.
When you plant, root prune potted plants aggressively, cutting through matted roots on the outside of the root ball many times on the sides and bottom. This will allow many new roots to quickly shoot out into the surrounding soil, providing much faster establishment and far better long term vigor.
Plant no deeper than the level the tree, shrub or perennial was growing in the pot or field, and make a circular dike of soil an inch or two high around each plant. Place 1 to 2 inches of mulch over the dike to keep it from washing away during the first year when the plant is becoming established.
The dike will assure that the small amounts of water you provide everyday or every other day during the first 2-3 months will soak directly down into the root ball, providing adequate, but not excessive moisture. By making this small dike around each plant, it takes only a few seconds a day to water each plant by hand. As a result, most planting projects will require only a few minutes a day to keep adequately watered. Read More
We are excited about our upcoming Shade Garden seminar
This seminar will feature interesting shade perennials (it’s not just hosta anymore) that every shade gardener should know about! Come and check out our shady characters!
We’ll discuss deer deterrents and some ideas on keeping slugs away.
Advance registration would be appreciated. We’ll have a coffee, cookies & lemonade. Every seminar registrant will receive a free selected perennial for the shade! We’ll be outside in the shade or if it’s raining, we’ll hold the seminar in our shade greenhouse.
One of my favorite shade perennials at home blossoming right now is the Campanula ‘Samantha’. It is tucked in between two of our Ely greenstone boulders and it is full of lavender-blue blossoms. A compact long flowering Campanula with fragrant flowers, it blooms heavily in early summer. It will rebloom with periodic deadheading. I have this planted in an area that gets the morning sun. Depending on the source, it will say it is a Zone 4 or a Zone 5. I have had this plant here for many years so it has proven hardy here in Zone 4.
Other perennials that you can see here is Minuteman Hosta in the background, and in the foreground is a Tiarella.
Heidi Brosseau, our retail manager, made a display this afternoon of all of the different Yarrow that we have in bloom right now. Achillea - Yarrow - is a very hardy perennial. We have seen wild Yarrow growing up in the Boundary Waters during the summer on our camping trips. A low maintenance perennial, it is deer resistant and drought tolerant. At maturity, Yarrow will reach a height of 20″ to 24″ and 18″ wide. It will attract butterflies and is wonderful in bouquets and dried flower arrangements. We have Yarrow in yellow, pink, orange and red.
A rain barrel is a container that is connected to roof gutters and collects the rain water - thereby reducing the amount of water reaching surface waters. You can then use this recycled water to water flowers, your grass or even washing your car. Not only do rain barrels save money on watering bills, they also conserve water, reduce the pollution that reaches surface waters and prevents erosion.
The Rice County Soil and Water Conservation District is sponsoring a build your own rain barrel workshop. It will be held at the Conservation Building at the Rice County Fairgrounds on Saturday, June 27th from 10:00 am to 2:00 pm. You should call in and reserve a 30 minute time slot. We have a sample rain barrel here at the nursery so you can have an idea of what you would be making. The cost for a build your own barrel is $35, and there is a limited supply of pre-made barrels available at $55. The phone number to call is 507-332-5408.
A shrub for part-shade that virtually glows is the Golden Carousel Barberry. We have several in an arc under our Autumn Spire Maple, with Blue Chip Junipers in front of those. In the very background of this photo, between the barberry, you will see one of our large blue hosta. The hosta gets mostly shade in this location and pulls out the same color blue as the blue chips which capture most of the sunlight in this garden.
The Golden Carousel Barberry needs at least half-day shade. It is a hybrid of the Korean and Japanese Golden Barberry. It’s upright growth habit with bright golden-yellow foliage brightens any corner of your garden. It will reach a mature height of 4′ with a width of 3′. Just let it grow natural like we do - or you can keep them pruned into a rounded shape as well. As with any barberry, it does have the thorns.
Another hosta variety that is a favorite is ‘Diana Remembered’. This is a medium sized hosta that has a white creamed colored edge with a vibrant blue-green on the inside of the leaf. The leaf is slightly corrugated. Named after Princess Diana, it has a large white flower that is one of the most fragrant hostas that you’ll come across.
This hosta variety will make a wonderful specimen plant, or you can make a backdrop using them with smaller hosta specimens in front. We’ll soon see the flower stalks emerging and the goregous white flower soon after.
Do you have stepping stones that weeds somehow find their way to between the stones? I have a large diameter perennial and annual bed at home with annuals around the outside 2-3 feet and then perennials on the inside of the bed. Instead of stepping between the annuals to do maintenance on the perennials, I installed a flagstone path on the backside of the bed for a walkway so I can access the middle of the bed. This spring with the cool weather - it seemed that every weed in Rice County wanted to grow between my paving stones. Yesterday, I planted several creeping thyme plants amongst and around the edges of the stones. It already looks great. In another few weeks, I’ll post another picture after it has taken hold and starting filling in.
Creeping thyme is one of those perennials that really gets crabby when it’s confined to a pot. It doesn’t like living in a small container at all. It was amazing that simply overnight - it changed it’s appearance significantly and I am very anxious to see what happens the next few weeks. It is blossoming right now and when it’s not full of tiny little flowers, it is just a nice green “mat” filling in the spaces between the stones.
Leaf tatter on certain varieties of trees has caused them to look as if they are diseased, sick or being attacked by insects. For the last several weeks I have taken a steady stream of calls about trees that are looking bad. The calls started coming in a couple of days after we had 2 consecutive days of heavy spring winds in the 40 to 50 mph range.
The good news is that if your tree is suffering from leaf tatter, it is very unlikely the tree will die. The bad news is that the tree may look bad for the rest of the 2009 growing season, but will come back strong next year.
Leaf tatter occurs when tender spring leaves are abused by heavy winds. Hour after hour of violent wind creates tiny cracks or tears in the leaves. A few days later these areas turn black, and later brown and crispy. Much of the leaf tissue may be alive, but the damaged cells eventually just fall off, leaving a tattered leaf that has holes that might lead you to think insects were chewing holes in the leaves.
Red Maples such as Northwood, Autumn Spire, Red Sunset and Burgundy Belle are the most susceptible to leaf tatter. Newly planted hybrids of Red Maple and Silver Maple also can be vulnerable to leaf tatter. Once the hybrids such as Autumn Blaze Maple and Sienna Maple have been established for 2 or 3 growing seasons leaf tatter is much less common. The trees have grown larger root systems and the larger volume of roots allows the tree to more rapidly thicken the tissue of the leaves to a thickness that is able to resist cracking in heavy winds.
This year the violent winds in mid to late May came from the south/southwest. If your sad looking tree looks worse on the south side than on the north side, it is probably leaf tatter that caused the damage.
If you see new growth emerging from the tattered areas, and we don’t get bad winds for several weeks, and the new leaves look normal, then the damage your tree experienced was leaf tattering.
To help a tree work past the leaf tatter, water it heavily once a week and fertilize with Miracle Grow once every three weeks. Apply no fertilizer after August 20th, so the tree can use up the fertilizer and go dormant at the right time in the fall.
I have also shared this blog with the website at the Northfield News.
A reminder to those of you that are re-doing your landscaping this summer! Think about entering the Great Minnesota Makeover Contest. 
Bailey Nurseries is sponsoring this contest which started on May 22nd and runs through July 31st. We are a participating garden center. See our Blog Post from May 22nd for more information! Enter your yard - before and after! Grand prize is a trip to Disney World!
The Praying Hands Hosta has to be one of the most intriguing varieties out in the marketplace. The upright narrow leaves of this plant gives it an unuual look like no other! Each green leaf is rolled and folded into a tube shape, displaying the prominent vens on the back of the leaf A thin white margin borders the outside edge of the leaf. Certainly a collector’s hosta - for the person who wants something different!
Jerry Williams - the person who discovered Praying Hands - lives here in Northfield and is a frequent customer here at the nursery. It’s always exciting talking hosta with our customers!
Summer planting is successful planting. Long warm days give newly planted trees, shrubs and perennials all the daylight they need to establish new root systems over the remainder of the summer and fall.
Simply provide each plant with adequate, but not excessive moisture and nutrition, and they are sure to follow their internal genetic programming that favors growing new roots over producing lots of top growth. This will prepare summer plantings to store lots of energy this season for an explosion of growth next spring.
I recommend mixing a moderate amount of timed release fertilizer in with the soil you fill in around each of your new plants. Mix the fertilizer evenly into the backfill soil and don’t overdo on the amount of fertilizer. With each watering, the plant will get a wonderful little dose of nutrition.
Two nice rains of almost 2 inches each have come to the Northfield area in the last week and a half, partially alleviating some of the stress that the dry spell of April and May caused for landscape plants, for cops and natural lands. Keep in mind that sub-soils got extremely dry this spring and that several more substantial rains will be needed to restore moisture reserves to normal.
If long dry spells return in July, August and September, your plants will benefit from a good watering, but for now that won’t be necessary unless you have landscape plants that have been planted during the last 12 months, and are still trying to grow new roots out into the surrounding soil.
I have also shared this post with the Northfield News on their website.
Yesterday, I spent a little time weeding the actual rows in my garden - after the rain those pesky weeds popped up, but it wasn’t a long and laborious task. The weed barrier fabric that I have in the garden provided a fairly dry place to work even though the soil was wet, and there weren’t weeds in the aisles to deal with. I tossed the weeds that I pulled into the middle of the aisle, and then took my broom and swept them up!
I harvested some onions and radishes, planted some more string beans, and Heidi and I planted some sun flower plants that we had started from seed this spring. They are already a few feet high and we look forward to the classic look of the sunflowers later this summer as well as a food source for all of the birds we have here at the nursery.
The first year (last year) of putting the landscape fabric down was a little work (and expense) to do, but it will last for us for several years and it makes the maintenance of the garden so much easier, from input to weed control and actual harvesting. As my cucumbers vine out, they stay on top of the fabric and you never have a cucumber that’s been laying in the dirt. I have it laid out in such a way that will make it easy to rotate my location for tomatos and peppers as well. If anyone wants to see how we actually have this laid out is welcome to stop by the nursery here and take a look.
The establishment of the highly destructive emerald ash borer in Minnesota will once again force us to re-evaluate what type of trees we should be planting. When Dutch Elm Disease devastated our urban and native forests starting in the 1950’s the same question was asked since so many communities had planted such large numbers of Elm trees.
The all too frequent answer to this question between 1960 and 2005 was to plant large numbers of ash trees. Seedless Ash varieties were available and ash were easy to grow in tough urban conditions. The results were the over-planting of ash trees, and great vulnerability to another disease or pest.
Planting so many ash trees was simply foolish and ignored the hard lesson learned of Dutch Elm Disease. Our response to the havoc being created by Emerald Ash Borer should be to plant a wide diversity of trees so if/when another devastating pest or disease comes along, we will lose a far smaller percentage of our urban forests.
When considering choices for shade trees, try to get a fairly even balance from the following families of trees: Oaks, Maples. Lindens, Hackberry, Birch, Horsechestnut, Ironwood, Yellowwood, Catalpa, Honeylocust, Ginkgo, Maackia, Aspen, Kentucky Coffee Tree, Amur Corktree, Locust, Willow and the many good new hybrid Elm varieties that are highly resistant to Dutch Elm Disease.
When considering Ornamental trees, try to achieve a balance from the following groups: small Maples, Flowering Crabs, Magnolia, Cherry, Plum, Lilac, Hydrangea, Forsythia, Ninebark, Euonymous, Bleu Beech, Pagoda Dogwood, Hawthorn, Weeping Pea Shrub, dwarf evergrens of various kinds, dwarf or narrow form Birches and Oaks, small Willows and the native Showy Mountain Ash.
As you can see there are plenty of options available in both shade and ornamental trees to help us avoid over-planting of one kind of tree. Be sure to make your choices to the varieties best suited to your particular site conditions of soil type, light availability, drainage, amount of space available, slope, possible pollution, presence of utility lines/other obstructions, and the regulations in your local unit of government.
If finding the right tree seems a bit challenging, you may want to stop by the nursery for some professional advice. Make your mind up to enjoy variety. Viva la Difference!
I am also sharing this post with my web blog for the Northfield News.
