Public Gardening

This afternoon about a dozen Friends of the Northfield Public Library spent a few hours weeding the flower beds, planting, trimming shrubs, raking, and just plain sprucing up the area outside of the library. This comes on top of a pile of planting and designing of landscaped areas that has already been done by Judy [...]

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Eastern Tent Caterpillars

Nearly every spring, I have to remove a nest or two of Eastern Tent Caterpillars (Malacosoma americanum) from the apple trees in our yard. This year appears to be a good year for the caterpillars as I’ve pulled four nests out so far. Eastern tent caterpillars build their silky, web-like nests in the crotches of [...]

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The Magic of Mulch

I spent part of Saturday cleaning up around my raised vegetable beds and adding mulched-paths. Because the beds are at the edge of my property and are sitting in/near a meadow, it can get pretty overgrown by the end of the season. For the paths, I put down cardboard and covered it with mulch. I’m [...]

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A Peony in Bloom

Yesterday I noticed my tree peony has started to bloom already — in fact, it went from just slightly open to fully in bloom in a few hours Saturday afternoon.  My other peonies — all the herbaceous type — have a few tight balls on them, but no sign of bloom.  I bought this one [...]

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If You’re Worried About Emerald Ash Borer…

You may want to check out the attached PDF of an article written by plant pathologist Katharine D. Widin in the May/June 2008 issue of Northern Gardener. As you may know, the presence of EAB  in St. Paul was confirmed last week. Experts like Kathy, who is the magazine’s regular contributor on plant health issues [...]

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Lasagna Garden, Half-Baked

Lasagna gardening is a no-till method of starting a garden — usually one for vegetables — that produces humus-rich soil, the ideal environment for “heavy feeders” such as tomatoes. The basic idea is that you layer materials that normally would go into compost to create your garden bed. Like lasagna, the garden has several types [...]

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What Not to Plant

If you come across a plant that looks like this…do not plant it right away.
The specimen at left is the root ball of a Mammoth™ mum I purchased at a grocery store recently. Mammoth mums are a newish variety out of the University of Minnesota that reach a size of 3 feet tall and 5 [...]

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A Great Year for Tulips

One upside of the cool, wet weather we have had the last couple of weeks is an extended bloom period for tulips. In some years, it seems like the bulbs bloom one day, wilt in 80 degree temps the next, and blow off the stalks the third. Despite the high winds yesterday — gusts reported [...]

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Cherry (and Apple and Crabapple) Blossom Time

For a few years in the 1980s, I lived and worked in Washington, D.C.  Spring is long and glorious around the Capitol city, so visitors and residents enjoy two months or more of blossoming trees, including magnolias, cherries, dogwoods, crabapples, quince, and many others. The blossoming tree season here is much more compressed, which makes [...]

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A Sea of Geraniums and Other Sights at Donahue’s

This weekend is one of the biggest plant shopping weekends of the year and the folks at Donahue’s in Faribault are certainly ready for it. I visited Donahue’s earlier this week for a behind the scenes tour with Mary McIntyre Donahue, one of seven (or is it eight?) Donahue relatives currently involved in the massive [...]

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