When my parents were up to visit the other week, they got to drive Noah to theater camp since my foot has not been cleared to drive yet. They live in another state and don’t often get to do these types of things with us so it was fun for them to get to see sort of our day-to-day life.
While Noah was at camp, we made a trip to the local plant nursery to see what was new. We were mostly looking for things for mom and dad’s house since I can’t do much work in the yard with my foot. My mom found a Rose of Sharon or Althea that had been pruned into a small tree and it was such a pretty color!
She brought it to my house and set it over in my shade garden over on the north side of my house where I have my hostas to keep it out of the sun until they headed home. It looked so good in my flower bed that I had to get two for my house too. Mom and Dad planted them for me while they were here.
I think the colors are so delicate and beautiful. There are so many different shades of pink as the tree buds and blooms. I think it looks great in my shady flower bed.
I don’t have great soil over in that flower bed and these little trees have needed constant watering to stay healthy. I think they get more sun than they’re accustomed to and they start to droop by the end of the day.
We went to Home Depot and got some Treegator bags
so that we could give them a better drink. I think they’re a little bit of overkill for these small trees, but we fill the bags about halfway and make it work.
The Treegator bags hold about 20 gallons of water. One night, we filled them all the way and the full bag of water was literally making one of the trees lean over a bit. We had to use a flower pot to try to prop up the bag to keep the tree in place.
Filling the bags about halfway full has worked well for us though. It takes about 6 hours for the bag to empty, and the trees seem much happier since we started using them.
Our trees have a ton of buds on them right now and they seem to be settling in nicely. Pretty soon, the tree roots will start to grow deeper and we’ll be able to water them less. But for now, the Treegator bags
are helping out a lot.