Cold Climate Gardening

Thank you to Nicole at The Weblog Review for her very favorable review of this blog.

Popularity: 3% [?]

Another good source of information on cold climate gardening is the University of Minnesota Extension Service. Their online publications catalog is not organized for easy perusal, I’m afraid. Ornamental Grasses for Cold Climates is located under the Landscaping - Plant Selection. Roses for the North is under Flowers - Culture. It is probably better to use the search engine provided if you have a specific topic in mind, but it was easier to browse under their previous organization. Some of their more popular titles have free excerpts available for download, so it’s worth taking the time to see what they’ve got.

Popularity: 4% [?]

Just like you, Judy, “I like having an idea of whether [a plant] would turn to slime come April before I spend money on it.” I’m always on the lookout for sources of information that keep me from reinventing the wheel. Woody Landscape Plant Cold-Hardiness Ratings, Technical Bulletin #156 from the Maine Agricultural and Forest Experiment Station, is one of the first sources of information I found. UMaine maintains the Lyle E. Littlefield Ornamentals Trial Garden in Orono. According to the Introduction, “the site is in USDA hardiness zone 4a having suffered winter temperatures as low as -30 degrees F. three times in the last 6 years.” (This was published in 1994.) The plants are grown without winter protection …

Popularity: 4% [?]

Another magazine for northern gardeners is People, Places & Plants. This started out as a magazine for Maine gardeners, then expanded to cover all of New England. Checking their website before posting this link, I see they are about to start a second magazine for the Mid-Atlantic region. I haven’t actually seen an issue since the first year of its publication. At that point I found it to be a magazine worth browsing for the inspiration of other northern gardens, but not having enough how-to to make it worth paying for. Obviously they are doing well, so there must be plenty of people who do find them worth subscribing to.

I have also looked at Northern Gardener, the magazine …

Popularity: 3% [?]

Ah, November. A little time to breathe and do something besides the hard physical work of gardening. Like, read seed catalogs and go slightly mad with imagining all the things I’ll grow next year. And read gardening magazines–actually read them, not just flip through them and hope to remember them when there’s more time. My best favorite garden magazine is BBC Gardener’s World. The big glossy British magazine is obviously not cold-climate, but it is all in color, loads of photos, actually 12x a year, and many more pages than any of the US things. It is informative and good for the creative juices to see what people not in my neighborhood are …

Popularity: 4% [?]