Cold Climate Gardening

Look at the hardiness map for Minnesota and you will see that the whole state is in zone 4 or colder. The Minnesota State Horticultural Society, which publishes Northern Gardener Magazine, is devoted to helping northern gardeners. If you join the society, besides the magazine you will get borrowing privileges at the society’s library (they mail you the books!), as well as other benefits that would mostly appeal to local members. Or, you can subscribe to the magazine alone.

This month’s issue featured an article on hardy magnolias, as well as a northern native (bloodroot in this issue), an article on hardier …

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Some photos are more interesting when cropped severely

So many people expressed admiration for the header images that I decided to put them in the Cold Climate Gardening Flickr pool. You can view them here. It is a challenge to find images that are still interesting once you cut them down to 780×140 pixels. On the other hand, some photos are more interesting when cropped severely. I think I’m getting better at finding those.

Speaking strictly as a totally biased mother, I think there are some pretty talented photographers in my family. Of course, it doesn’t hurt to have a high-resolution digital camera, and the willingness to go tromping in all sorts of weather. Many thanks to all my …

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Boredom isn’t enough to motivate me to redecorate my walls or my website

“Why are you changing your design?” some of my children asked, as I was making preparations for the Big Day. I could have said, for the same reason many people re-paint their walls or buy a new dress: tired of the same old thing. But frankly, that doesn’t motivate me to redecorate my home or update my wardrobe. For me, increasing efficiency and usability was a far tastier “carrot” to compensate for the “stick” of a website overhaul.

My old design (or theme, as it’s called in WordPress circles) looked great, but wasn’t created with the most efficient code even at the time, and being old, couldn’t take advantage of the latest features of the WordPress software. Even worse, with certain operating systems running certain browsers (most notably Windows 2000 running IE), a lot of the type in the old design was so tiny it was illegible. Not good.

So late last fall I went theme shopping.

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I have just upgraded WordPress again. This time it combined link categories and post categories, so quite a few things need to be tinkered with. I will also be changing my theme shortly. Actually, I am going to change the theme first and then tinker, otherwise I’ll be tinkering twice. Sigh. The bottom line is, the front page should be fine, once I change the theme, but the rest of the site might be strange until I tinker with it. Here goes!

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Faithful readers of this blog will remember Rundy’s struggles with the brush mower, his love of fruit trees, and his fist-shaking frustration with animal pests. Those of you who are relatively new to this blog can read all his entries here. I am happy to tell you that Rundy’s first work of fiction, The Stuttering Bard of York, has recently been published. It is a spoof of the fantasy literature genre, and not at all like the writing on his own blog.

After contacting several publishers without positive results, …

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I am getting ready to upgrade my software from WordPress 1.5.2 to 2.0.8. I have to deactivate all my plugins. This will make the site look weird. Then I have to delete and reinstall. This will give you a 404 error. Then it will (Lord willing) be up and running again, but without the plugins, so still looking weird. Then, I will add the plugins back in, and it will look as it always has. At least, that is my intention.
So long.
Farewell.
Adieu.
Update: Done. I’m back. I think everything works. Let me know if you find something broken. For my next trick, I will attempt to change the theme. But not tonight. Enough for one day.

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You may have noticed I have been writing a lot of book reviews lately. There is a good reason for that. I have been spiffing up my Amazon store. For those of you who don’t keep up on these things (and why should you?), Amazon has given its associates the opportunity to create virtual stores stocked with products of the associate’s choosing. When visitors to an associate’s aStore click on something they find there, and purchase something in the same visit, the associate (in this case, me) gets a commission.

All well and good, except hardly anyone buys anything. That’s okay, because …

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