If you’re interested in following along with how our garden and landscaping efforts are coming along, you can read about my April Garden Notes HERE.  Over the past couple of years, I shared more frequent gardening updates here on the blog throughout the spring and summer, but this year has been more about maintenance so far.  I would like to plant some perennials to fill in some of the beds, but we’ve mostly focused our attention on the details of making a yard look nice – fertilizing, weeding, and trimming. I keep meaning to get out to prune the espalier apple trees, but I wanted to show how bushy and happy they are looking in their third spring here in my yard.  While I know pruning is good for plants, I always feel hesitant and drag my feet on cutting off new growth.  It seems like a sign of health,

There was a time when I thought English ivy was charming.  I mean, it is. When you see it growing up old brick homes, there is something beautiful about it.  Now that I have lived in a mid-century brick home that was half-eaten by English ivy, I no longer find it charming.  It stains the brick, it grows in windows and screens, it chokes out bushes and trees, and it’s incredibly hard to remove and control once it’s gone unchecked. A lot of ivy was removed from our home before it was put on the market.  We could see the remnants of it and have cleaned off the roots and staining as we’ve worked on the exterior of the home.  (You can read about how we removed ivy roots & stains HERE.)  And now we’re working on removing ivy from an overgrown bed on the left side of the house.