Judy Miller

I've looked up Honeycrisp apple in the Nafex archives and found I remembered correctly that it is well thought of by the Nafex folks who do go first for flavor & garden worthiness. They compared it to Macintosh for flavor. There was not much mention of Morello Cherries except that they have great flavor and [...]

The weather has been perfect lately if you are a duck or a goose (or me!): rainy, cool, soft. Perfect for transplanting roses which are seedlings no longer, for digging new holes for fruit trees, and for digging herbs to propagate. Every night or early morning I wake to the sound of rain, a blessing [...]

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

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. [...]

Radicchios, I just discovered a few years ago, are Winter Hardy Vegetables! (That is a big enough deal here in Z4 to rate caps.) I do nothing to winter them over--this panic covering was because they had only been snoozing over the false winter under their blanket of snow and were now putting out new [...]

Now the NOAA predicts near-zero weather for us in the next few days. I will have to race about covering the radicchios I was admiring yesterday as nearly large enough to start cutting, and the tender nubbins of other things fooled by the early warmth. It has been daily into the 40's: decoy weather. I [...]

It's not that the temperature is that much different--it is that we have sudden huge thaws that uncover what is beneath the snow. The little Colchicum flowered under the snow as the ground hadn't frozen when the snow came and it was good & warm under there--and there is quite a bit of light through [...]

When I read This Green World for the first time I kept running outside to check things, and inside to call my Mother to exclaim over what I had just read. That sense of wonder is exactly what I love about this book--and the amazing facts. Then I lent the book to Mom and whenever [...]

Correction to the rosemary hints. They can freeze--just not way deep like you'd get outside. I think something like 10F is the limit, maybe 15? Does your porch get colder than that? (Prescott AZ where I saw the planters full certainly sees that cold in the winter. They have some snow now.) And keep the [...]