Cold Climate Gardening

Welcome to the Fifth Anniversary Celebration of Cold Climate Gardening. Last week our readers were invited to submit questions, which I have answered here. I hope you are entertained and enlightened. Comments, as always, are encouraged.
Stuart: How do you see the next 5 years panning out, after the hiatus that is? What has been the biggest change that you’ve noticed over the past 5 years?–Well, Stuart, the biggest change in the past 5 years has been there are a lot more gardening blogs, as I’m sure you’re aware. Once upon a time, the garden blog community was compared to a lunch room. Now it’s more like a small town. You are intimate with your own circle, and you may know the leading figures of the community, but you just can’t know everyone. In the next five years for myself, I would like to help the people who still find the technology an obstacle and a barrier get more comfortable with blogging.

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Thank you one and all for nominating this blog for the Best Design of a Garden Blog category in the first annual Mouse & Trowel Awards. I confess I’ve always been a bit miffed at how garden blogs were so neglected in general blog awards, and I’m glad Colleen has taken the initiative and developed some awards we garden bloggers can call our own.

Voting is now open and will continue to May 11. Note: you don’t have to have a garden blog yourself to vote.

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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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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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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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Excuses, excuses. Here they all are:

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a short growing season makes for a very hectic spring. I am a victim of this no more and no less than any other short season gardener. The birthday season. Others drop out during the holiday season, but here in Purdyville we celebrate 9 birthdays between mid-March and mid-July, plus Mother’s Day, Father’s Day and two family reunions. That’s a lot of extra cooking and shopping and celebrating. It is wonderful to have so much to celebrate, but it does take time.
End-of-school-year testing and report writing.
A horticultural junket to Ithaca, NY and the writing of the article that prompted it. (Anticipated publication in Horticulture Oct ‘06, Northeast edition only) A …

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No, it’s not my blogiversary. That’s August 27, 2002. But one year ago today, I switched from an old, outdated version of Movable Type to WordPress. Along with the change to the inner workings of the website came a whole new look–and a whole lot of work. WordPress gave me the flexibility to integrate the blog and the rest of my website, but it took time to make the conversion, and most of it didn’t happen until this winter. In the meantime, I had a little notice in the upper right that said, in effect, the rest of the site is at this other link. That’s all in the past.

The menu at the top shows the basic structure of my …

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