Fall is Raspberry Season

Today I picked this bucket of raspberries from the small patch we have in our back yard. Raspberries are incredibly easy to grow, and unless you have a very small yard, they are a great use of garden space. I planted these last year in a 4-by-16 foot raised bed. I put in six [...]

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Fall Bloomers, Part 2

Normally these asters are my favorite fall flower. When they were planted eight years ago, I did not know much about perennials. I got the asters along with a couple of dozen other perennials at an end of season closeout. The next year, I watched the plant all summer thinking, “When is [...]

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Fall Bloomers

It’s September, so every garden I know of is bursting with Clara Curtis daisies. These pretty fall bloomers are a member of what was once the chrysanthemum family. (It’s been broken up by plant scientists and classifiers, and these are in the Dendranthema genus now.) Whatever their scientific name, these hardy mums are [...]

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Watermelon–A garden first

Market gardeners amaze me with their ability to grow melons. This is the first year I’ve grown a watermelon to eating size. I only got one off the plant–but hey, it tasted good. I harvested it a hair early because of the critter situation in my yard, but it was ripe and [...]

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Plant BIG Trees

The single best landscaping decision we ever made was to plant big trees on a new lot. Like many new homes, our house was built on a former cornfield. It had been terraced, but it was bare. At the suggestion of our landscaper, Leif Knecht of Knecht’s Nurseries and Landscaping, we planted six large trees, [...]

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New Northern Gardener Available

The September/October issue of Northern Gardener has been available for a couple of weeks now. It’s a great issue with articles on the trouble with bees, using golden foliage plants in your garden, shrubs and trees with ornamental fruit, and an article about Living Legacy Gardens in Staples. It’s available on the magazine racks at [...]

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Welcome to My Garden

Even though I edit a garden magazine, I’m not an expert gardener. My mother has a green thumb, but I was not one of those gardeners forced to pick beans or hoe weeds as a child who cannot get gardening out of their blood. For years, I refused to have houseplants because I killed [...]

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