It’s still too early to be tromping around in the garden, so the great weather on Saturday seemed like an invitation to finish some garden building projects. So, after picking up some deck screws and 2-by-2 posts at the local lumberyard, I started work on my new raised bed. (I bought the cedar for the sides last fall.) This bed…
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Spring is one of the big seasons for releasing garden books, and a pile of them have landed on my desk recently. Some will be reviewed in Northern Gardener, but we have room for only one review per issue, so I thought I’d review a few here as I wait for the snow to melt (happening rapidly!) and the ground…
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The late, great Malcolm Burleigh, an award winning grower and breeder of cacti and succulents, approached me once with an idea for an article in Northern Gardener about the pH of city water and its effect on plants. Malcolm and one of his cactus-growing friends from California had discovered that city water tends to be much more alkaline than rain…
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Dr. Mark Seeley, author of the Minnesota Weather Almanac and a regular radio commentator on climate and weather, spoke at the Rice County Horticultural Day this morning. Seeley gave the full-house of gardeners attending the event an overview on how the weather is changing in Minnesota, with a few ideas on how to accommodate it. Here are my take-aways from…
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Update from 2018: I have visited the wonderful Marjorie McNeely Conservatory many times since I wrote the post below. (Apologies for the tiny photos from 2008.) You can check out my article about the conservatory’s 100th anniversary here. I was in St. Paul on business today, and one of the events I had scheduled was canceled. So, I found myself…
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