Fall Clean-Up

I took advantage of yesterday’s nice weather to play hooky from the computer for an hour to do a little fall clean-up in the garden. The cold temperatures Friday and Saturday nights stopped most of my perennials. The more tender plants I had in containers wilted completely. I’ve now emptied all the containers, except for [...]

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New Northern Gardener Available

The November/December 2007 issue of Northern Gardener is now available. I’m excited about this issue because it has something for all kinds of gardeners. If you are a do-it-yourselfer, check out Susan Davis Price’s profile of Philippe Galandat’s St. Paul garden. Philippe is one of those amazing people who see a pile of bricks [...]

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Frost on a Rose

We’ve had two mornings in a row with significant frost and the thermometer on my deck showed about 30 degrees F at 9 a.m. today. The flowers, especially the tender annuals, are getting nipped, but frost looks becoming on this just-opening rose.

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Hooray for Autumn Joy

As I’ve been thinking about the new flower bed I’ll be installing this fall and next spring, a few plants rate as “must-haves.” One of them is Autumn Joy sedum, which is currently in bloom in my garden and in many others from Canada to the south. What a great plant!
Its scientific names is Sedum [...]

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Update on the Pumpkin Planters

I had hoped my pumpkin planters would last until Halloween, but Mother Nature had other ideas. The heavy rains we’ve had since I put the pumpkins out more than two weeks ago has taken a toll, and one of the pumpkins is rotting at the bottom. Yesterday we experienced what felt like gale-force winds; I [...]

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African Violet Show This Weekend

Indoor plants have never been my strong suit. I’m just too apt to water too much or too little, which is why I’m in awe of gardeners who can keep African violets blooming all year. This weekend, Minnesota’s premier African violet growers will be showing their stuff at the North Star African Violet Council’s [...]

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Things Just Keep On Blooming

While out in the garden Saturday, I noticed two more plants blooming that I would not have expected so late in October. In my front bed, a rose has more than a dozen buds on it. These are Flower Carpet Roses, a long-blooming, hardy rose, though I don’t recall ever getting buds this [...]

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Another Great Day to Garden

Two perfect Saturdays in a row–what’s a gardener to do? Judging by the crowds of trucks and trailers pulling into and out of the Northfield compost heap, lots of folks used the day to do end-of-season chores. I made two trips to the brush pile to unload branches we cut last week. I’ll [...]

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Fall Bloomers: A Sign of Zone Creep?

Maybe it’s the heavy rains we have had this fall or a sign of global warming, but I’m finding surprising things blooming. Yesterday, I discovered new blooms on an English Larkspur (Delphinium elatum ‘Pagan Purples’). I bought the larkspur late in the spring in hopes of getting taller flowers in the back of my front [...]

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Negative Space

Natalie Goldberg, author of the groundbreaking writing book Writing Down the Bones, says writers need to see and describe negative spaces–what is not obviously present in a scene, the spaces in between what is there. Often, she says, that is where the meaning is. I thought about Goldberg’s negative space idea after my [...]

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