Welcome to My Northern Garden!
Like many northern gardeners, I’ve struggled with all the usual suspects: snow, ice, cold, wind, heat, humidity and bugs — lots of bugs! But, despite all our challenges, northern gardeners still grow some of the prettiest gardens around. How do they do it?
They embrace our cold climate. They pick hardy plants and they use tried-and-true techniques for growing gardens in the Upper Midwest. I learned about a lot of those techniques while writing my book, The Northern Gardener: From Apples to Zinnias, a book of garden wisdom for cold-climate gardeners. You’d be surprised at some of the things our gardening ancestors tried. (Pruning tomatoes to look like super models and using manure to heat their seed-starting cold frames are just a couple of the more unusual garden tricks they used.)
I love sharing those techniques as well as modern ones in this blog and in Northern Gardener, the magazine of the Minnesota State Horticultural Society and the only magazine devoted exclusively to cold-climate gardening. I also give talks to garden groups, library friends and anyone else who wants to learn more about gardening in the North.
How is your garden growing?