For Better Garden Photos: Know Thy Camera

If you want to take better pictures of your garden (or for that matter, your kids, birds, places you visit, sporting events or anything else), the first thing you need to learn is your camera — and what controls it offers you. That was the message of Eileen Herrling, a Wisconsin-based photographer, who led the [...]

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Hungry for Spring

You can tell it’s been a tough winter when 550 gardeners get together to talk plants in Wausau in January. I spoke with one of the organizers of Garden Visions a couple of weeks ago and she said more than 350 people had signed up already and the organizers expected to top their goal of [...]

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Off to Garden School

Winter is school time for gardeners. So, tomorrow I’m off to Wausau, WI, for the Second Annual Garden Visions conference, sponsored by the North Central Wisconsin and Portage County Master Gardeners. It promises to be a great program, with several Minnesota garden stars, such as Jeff Gillman of the University of Minnesota and renowned nature [...]

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A Mighty Oak Cracked

Something both surprising and a little worrisome has happened to one of my favorite trees. A crack about 6 feet long and as wide as my pinky finger in some spots has opened up along the trunk of the oak that sits on the north side of our house.
As far as I can tell, the [...]

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Garden Smackdown: Bush vs. Pole Beans

As vegetable gardeners salivate over catalogs during the long winter nights, the perennial question emerges: Should I plant bush or pole beans? During the Vegetable Gardening 101 class I attended at Just Food Co-op, Laura Frerichs of Loon Organics offered a good summary of the pros and cons of each.
Bush Beans: Generally, they are earlier [...]

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Vegetable Gardening Class a Hit

I sat in on Just Food Co-op’s first of two classes on vegetable gardening last night. Conducted by Laura Frerichs, co-owner of Loon Organics, the class covered the basics of getting started with a vegetable garden, from picking a sunny spot (a must) to prepping the soil (healthy soil = healthy plants) to using row [...]

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What Would You Name Your Garden?

I’ve been reading Julie Moir Messervy’s excellent new book, Home Outside: Creating the Landscape You Love, which gives homeowners several techniques for figuring out what they want from their yard and garden and how to achieve it. One of her suggestions is to name your landscape. Here’s what she says:
Naming helps you establish a theme [...]

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Best Bets for Beginning Vegetable Gardeners

I spent most evenings over the past week digging through the stacks of seed catalogs that have been arriving at my house since Thanksgiving. While I probably get more catalogs than most gardeners, it struck me how daunting deciding what to grow might be for beginning vegetable gardeners.
And, there will be lots of beginning vegetable [...]

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Not Tonight Deer and Other Garden Giggles

During our recent spell in the deep freeze, I’ve been spending the evening going through garden catalogs, ripping out pages of the seeds and tools I might order. Garden catalogs are very enticing, but also great fun–especially the names of the plants and products. Gardeners seem to have a taste for the corny and the [...]

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We’re Still In Zone 4

Over the past several years, many Minnesota gardeners have started to plant as if we live in a Zone 5 state. I’m among those hopeful souls — and have had mixed results with less hardy plants. But today’s rippingly cold weather is a reminder that we still live in Zone 4.
For those not familiar with [...]

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