March 2003

I look at lists of pears in old catalogs or encyclopedias and feel faint with longing. The book 'Pomona's Harvest' will curl your hair with what's been lost. Still, there are lots available and one variety I am intrigued with

Which pears and sweet cherries do you grow? Where did you get them, locally or mail order?

I visited Bachman's once--the store was bigger than my hometown! When I worked at a nursery in Grand Forks ND, we kept an extensive library of all the handouts from the Minnesota and ND Extension services and the U of M. They were always a resource to us and we gave them to our customers. [...]

I just discovered this . . . Google is scanning mail order catalogs and making them available for the general public, including a whole bunch of gardening catalogs! The selection is good--I've seen many catalogs just clicking through the website briefly that I haven't heard of before and want to check out. Not only that, [...]

Where has this little gem been all my gardening life? Bachman's is a florist and nursery in Minnesota. They have created a whole slew of caresheets on just about every gardening topic imaginable, aimed at helping the Minnesotan gardener succeed. Since all of MN is hardiness zone 4 or colder, any cold climate gardener should [...]

The snowdrops in the Secret Garden are all blooming now, the same ones I tried to will out of the ground earlier. These are my most rapidly increasing snowdrops. I got them from a friend who found them growing in a field near her house. Presumably there was once a house and garden where she [...]

Here is the first flower of 2003, which opened in my garden today. It's a crocus, not a snowdrop, which was a surprise to me. But it's a crocus that I think got unearthed when I was planting peonies and probably wasn't as deep as it should have been. Now you're going to ask me [...]

This is our third day of mild weather (in the 60s today!) but my first opportunity to get out and take a look. There are snowdrops well up in the Secret Garden with snow all around them. I wonder if the rest of the snowdrops there are up, too, and just hidden from sight? Maybe [...]

Just came across the November/December 2002 issue of Organic Gardening, and on pages 34-35 they had plans for the mother of all coldframes. (Unfortunately, I couldn't find the plans on the Organic Gardening website, so you'll have to find the issue at a library and photocopy it.) The author, David Wann, and his neighbor designed [...]