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…
Read More
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…
Read More
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…
Read More
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…
Read More
There’s a funny scene in the movie Time Bandits, in which Michael Palin of Monty Python and travel book fame, has a relapse of his “problem,” and yells, “Oh, Pansy, I must have fruit!” When my daughters were younger, this was a much-quoted line in our house, in part because we all like fruit. I like to grow fruit, too,…
Read More