A Dash of Color on a White Winter Day

Peek A Boo!  I see you!

Got a taste of Spring yesterday with all the warm weather and sunshine. The cold, wind and snow are back this morning though.  Wisconsin weather, you are such a tease!  

My container plants seem anxious for spring as well.  Yesterday  I found overwintered geraniums starting to bloom.  They’ve surprised me a couple of times now.  It’s the first time I’ve overwintered geraniums and when I brought them inside this past Fall they set seed and I had fluffy seedheads all over the dang place.  Some seeds even rooted in the soil of other houseplants.  What a mess but it was kind of fun watching the cats chase the fluff.

The geraniums seem happy but I’ve really struggled to keep my star jasmine vines going.  Even in the basement where it’s cooler, it just isn’t humid enough.  I’m watering them almost daily but they’re still looking dessicated.  Putting them under a grow light might have been a mistake.

These spruce trees are like the local bar-everyone hangs out there.

Yesterday I was out hand-watering young evergreen shrubs in the yard and I noticed that my mature spruce trees are really water-stressed too.  I think animals are also being affected by our strangely warm and dry winter.  The other day there was a lot of activity up in the spruce trees.  Cones were dropping like rain all around me.  Looking up, I saw some bright red birds with black and white wings feeding on the cones still hanging from the branches.  They hung around for several days, stripping the trees of their cones.  

I think they were pine grosbeaks, which I thought wintered in the far north of the state.  I know I’ve never seen them around here before.  I wonder what they are doing down here?

They were a dash of color on a white winter's day and so are my unexpected geranium blooms. Both put a smile on my face.

My Spruce Dilemma

We used to camp every summer at Hartman Creek State Park near Waupaca, WI.  I would walk for hours in the huge stands of pine planted there years ago.  The floor was covered in needles and almost nothing grew under those trees.  Since they were planted in long neat rows it gave it a weird Alice-In-Wonderland feel to those strangely quiet woods.  I've been charmed by evergreens ever since.

So, when we bought our place, I was thrilled that it had a bunch of tall spruce hiding the house from the street.   There were pendulous Norway Spruce, White Spruce (aka Green Spruce) and Blue Spruce all grouped together along with some deciduous trees and Eastern Red Cedars.

It wasn't long though before I noticed that some of the trees looked pretty sickly and there were a bunch of dead branches where the trees had shaded each other out.  That fall I noticed needles on all the spruces except the Norway turning brown and dropping.  An arborist confirmed rhizosphaera, a chronic fungal needle cast disease that infects the trees in spring but doesn't kill off the needles until fall. 

Turns out my spruce are highly stressed.  They don't like heavy clay soil.  (Oops, that's what we've got.)  They like acidic soil. (Ours is about as alkaline as you can get.)  They don't handle drought well (There's always drought in Wisconsin in the summer.)  And, finally, they were improperly spaced when first planted, so not only are they stressed but will always have crowded roots and barely enough foliage.  My arborist said he doesn't like spruce because they get ugly and diseased as they age.  He recommended I clear cut them and replace them with something else,  like fir or pine.

I was horrified.  It was one of the features of our yard that I really thought was cool.  Trying to think of an alternative, I suggested maybe he could thin them to just a few trees but because they were spaced so close together, there were too many bare spots and they would look even worse.  It wasn't much of an option.  As for taking them all out, I really didn't want to do it.  The trees are a hot spot for birds (like my favs, the chickadees) and squirrels.  I know there are red squirrels nesting in them.  And, I really do like how they shield the house and yard from the street. 

Dead branches were removed from the ground to 10-15' up the trunks.

So, I decided to just have the arborist clear out the dead branches, which turned out to be a miserable job.  All that afternoon I had two young guys up in the trees, yelping in pain as they got poked hard by sharp dead tree branches.  They tried not to take any branches that were still alive, even if there were bare patches above them so the trees still look a bit ratty, but definitely better than before their trim. 

As for the needlecast disease, I put a layer of leaves and bark mulch under the trees last spring.  I plan to put another thick layer of compost and mulch under them this spring, along with some soil acidifier granules.  The trees didn't lose their needles like they did the year before.  I suspect that it was mostly due to our weirdly dry spring weather but maybe spreading that layer of organic matter under the trees helped too. 

So, that's my spruce dilemma.  I really should take them all out and start over fresh but I'm going to put it off for now and let some of the younger spruce and other evergreens in my yard grow up some so they can provide food and shelter to the birds/squirrels.  I may also thin them out a bit, even if the result isn't very pretty.  What do you think I should do?