Got Seeds? Let’s Share ‘Em.
- On October 12, 2015
- By Meleah
- In Annuals, Natives, Perennials, Seeds, Uncategorized, Veggies
- 0
Come on over gardener friends! It’s time once again to start sharing seeds at the Little Free Seed Library at my house. As many of you know from all my going on about it, the top shelf of our Little Free Library morphs into a place to share seeds every spring and fall. The library is located on the boulevard on the corner of 45th Street and Washburn Ave. S. in Linden Hills. (For more information and photos, check out this blog post from a couple of years ago.
I’ve already started putting seeds in there from my garden, but it would be great if many of you could bring some seeds too. If you do, please bring them in envelopes or baggies labeled with the name of the plant—one type of seed per container. If you would like to, and have the time, the label (or a piece of paper taped to the envelope or baggie) could include helpful tips like whether the seeds should be direct sown in fall or spring or started indoors before planting. That stuff isn’t necessary, though, if you just want to bring seeds, great!
When I started the Little Free Seed Library, I envisioned having all sorts of information inside about individual seeds and things like saving, starting and storing seeds. Three years on, I haven’t done that yet. I’m having trouble coming up with a way to make that stuff shareable without killing a zillion trees making handouts. I’m thinking about doing some laminated pages that people could look at without taking them. But if your brains are like mine, what you read probably won’t stick long.
Maybe people with smartphones could take pictures of the pages to read later? And yet, I hate to make things reliant on having a phone in your hand all the time. It’s not like I hate technology or anything, quite the opposite. But it makes me sad for the world to see so many people walking around this beautiful, amazing planet with their eyes glued to a stupid phone screen when they could be checking out a cool plant or bird, or maybe even talking with the real-live humans walking right beside them.
But I digress. Maybe laminated sheets are the way to go. If you have better ideas, I’d be grateful to hear them so please email me at my blog. If you come to get seeds and find some you’d like, there are small envelopes inside the box to put them in. You’ll also find pencils so you can label what you’re taking home. As I write this, the library so far includes these seeds: Royalty Purple Pod heirloom bush beans, Pot of Gold chard, Straight Eight heirloom cucumbers, blackberry lily, tropical milkweed (an annual milkweed), red swamp milkweed, black-eyed Susan, Queen Anne’s lace, hyacinth bean, white cleome, purple cleome, gray-headed coneflower and anise hyssop. There will be much more coming soon, and I leave seeds out for sharing until later in November when the whole library gets turned over to books once again.
Read More»Second Bloom—Betty Ann Addison Launches an Encore Nursery in Her Own Backyard
- On September 10, 2015
- By Meleah
- In Annuals, Perennials, Trees and Shrubs, Uncategorized
- 3
Betty Ann Addison was preparing to say goodbye to her beloved, 16-acre nursery, Rice Creek Gardens, when I first met her in 2006. After 20 years, rising taxes and assessments had made running the park-like nursery she and her late husband, Charles, opened on the site of a former junkyard in Blaine a losing proposition. Her eyes were sad, but the joy she felt as she pointed out specific plants, many of which she and Charles had hybridized themselves, was obvious in the way she smiled, or sometimes laughed in that way she does, short, sweet, a cross between a squeal and a giggle. A person would have to be made of stone to not be made happy by that laugh. Hugging goodbye, she admitted that the move was hard, but things were going to be all right, she said, because “I will remember how blessed I’ve been, and I will go on living every moment and, well, isn’t that enough?”
Such a sentiment might sound hopelessly upbeat coming from someone else. But people who know Addison, who is now in her late 70s, know that she is the sort of person who has always lived every moment—and then some. Over lunch at her house in Feburary, she apologized for being tired, explaining that she had just gotten home from the gym and was feeling a bit discombobulated due to floor refinishing, kitchen updating and other house projects in the works. Still, in between bites of the chicken soup she’d made for us, she talked excitedly about the presentation she would soon be doing for the Potomac Valley Chapter of the North American Rock Garden Society in Bethesda, Maryland.
Addison is well known for her rock gardening expertise and has designed and built several public rock gardens including the Peace Garden at Lake Harriet in Minneapolis, as well as gardens in New York’s Central Park. “Rock gardening is the highest horticultural art because it incorporates so many thousands of wild and cultivated plants, combined with rocks, to make a landscape based on nature” she says. To illustrate, she tells the story of how her mother took up rock gardening in her 70s. “My mother passed away at 93 and she was a great gardener all her life. When she told me she wanted to try rock gardening, I built one for her and she said it was the best garden she ever had because every day there was something new to discover.”
For decades, Addison traveled the world with her mother, bringing home plants to try in their home gardens: hers in Minnesota and her mother’s on Long Island where Addison grew up. Sometimes the two of them brought back so many plants in their luggage, they had to send their clothes home in boxes. At a time when Minnesotans had few hardy plants to choose from, Addison’s trials and propagation of thousands of varieties of seeds from worldwide sources helped make the wider selection gardeners enjoy today possible.
Addison is a longtime propagator and breeder of hardy rhododendrons, including large-leaf rhododendrons, which were long thought to be ungrowable in this climate. Recently, she purchased an acre of land across the street from her house for testing rhododendrons and she’s looking forward to seeing some of her hybrid creations bloom this spring. On the day I visited, Addison was most concerned with the immediate need to transplant the hundreds of alpine cuttings growing in flats in the sunny, south-facing greenhouse she had built several years ago. Just a short set of stairs down from her living room, the greenhouse is the starting place for many of the plants she sells at her home-based nursery, Gardens of Rice Creek, in Fridley. The nursery is open every Saturday from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. starting in May through Labor Day. And as she did at Rice Creek in Blaine, Addison offers an extraordinary selection of rare and unusual plants, including dwarf conifers, alpine and rock garden plants, as well as native wildflowers and rhododendrons. (For more information visit the Gardens of Rice Creek website.)
Read More»Rules, Plants and Gardening for the Future
- On November 13, 2014
- By Meleah
- In Annuals, Natives, Perennials, Uncategorized
- 5
For me, the words “neighborhood sweep” bring to mind the busting up of meth labs and prostitute rings, or maybe less dramatically, a big litter cleanup day in which everybody pitches in. But on Friday, we got a letter from the City of Minneapolis Department of Regulatory Services Housing Inspection Services Division advising us that we were being cited in response to a NEIGHBORHOOD SWEEP (yes, all caps) for the “conditions” of the gardens along the sidewalk on one side of our house. Failing to correct the NUISANCE CONDITIONS (perhaps they should be cited for errant use of all caps) could, they advised, result in the city arranging to do the job one way or another at some future date.
What were those nuisance conditions, you ask? Fall flowers, mostly New England asters and a couple of varieties of golden rod, but I admit that a few black-eyed Susan’s and blackberry lilies also ran afoul of the law by encroaching here and there on the public sidewalk. Growing primarily in our boulevard gardens and heavy with seeds, in the case of the lilies, and blooms in the case of the rest of the flowers, the plants were indeed lolling out onto the walkway an inch or two in a few places.
And there was one rogue aster leaning out at an awkward angle at about fourth-grader height. We also have a river birch in our yard and its wispy branches, which we routinely trim, are at least six feet above the sidewalk. The rule, we now know, is seven feet.
Even with all of this mayhem and out-of-control bramble, two people could have handily pushed a couple of shopping carts or strollers side by side down the walk and been brushed only slightly, if at all, by plants. There are no fat shrubs hogging space or heavy, low-hanging tree limbs threatening to bump heads or poke eyes out. So while it is understandable that in a civilized society we need to have rules about things like keeping public sidewalks clear, this citation seemed outside the bounds of reasonableness to me.
Our neighbors can attest to the fact that we spend a lot of time pulling weeds, pruning and trimming plants, and just generally working hard to keep our yard looking good and out of people’s way. We’ve never had anyone complain about problems getting down the sidewalk. Honestly, people walking by often go out of their way to stop and tell us how much they appreciate the peaceful pocket of nature we’ve cultivated in the city.
Families stop to watch the bees, butterflies and dragonflies flitting from plant to plant. We answer all sorts of gardening questions, and have learned a lot from other gardeners too. People as far away as several blocks often stop to tell us that we’ve inspired them to start their own gardens, and many of us share seeds and plants.
It pained us to cut down flowers that bees and birds were actively feeding on last weekend because rules are rules. And I couldn’t help wondering how many other gardeners had been cited and were experiencing the same thing. So I want to ask whoever is listening, what can we do as a city to rethink rules that require a level of obedience from nature that simply isn’t possible while ensuring that our sidewalks remain safe and traversable? For every person whose day is made brighter by urban gardens, and every creature, especially pollinators, that seeks those gardens out for habitat, it’s a question we need to consider.
Summer Garden Tour Photos
I love the longer shadows and golden light that come with September. But I can hardly believe that summer is nearly over. It went by so fast, though I did manage to get to a few garden tours.
Here are a few of the photos I took of some of the lovely moments along the way.
Let’s start with paths.
And now for water features, large and small.
Comfy sitting areas.
And things I just like.
Neonic-Free Plants—Buyer Beware
I generally try to avoid writing a lot about the same issue for fear of boring people to death or seeming like a nutter who can’t stop ranting about one thing or another. In the case of neonicotinoid pesticides, though, I’ve received so many calls and emails on this topic since I started writing about it a few months back, I feel like updates are wanted and needed. So I’m going to go with that feeling and tell you more about what I’ve learned lately in hopes that this will help answer some questions you may have now that you’ve likely learned more about this issue too.
First, here’s a quick recap for those who don’t yet know about neonicotinoids. Neonics, as they are often called, are a class of pesticides that have been linked to the decline of bees, particularly honeybees, over the last decade. Because they are safer for humans than some other pesticides, neonics have become widely used in the nursery trade as a pre-treatment for annuals, perennials, shrubs and trees. They are also found in many of the common pest control products gardeners buy off the shelf and use every day for everything from Japanese beetles to emerald ash borer. (Neonic pesticides include: imidacloprid, acetamiprid, clothianidin, dinotefuran, nithiazine, thiacloprid and thiamethoxam.)
Now that studies have shown that small amounts of neonics can harm bees feeding on the pollen and nectar of treated plants while larger doses can kill, more and more gardeners are making it a point to stop using products that contain neonics and to shop for plants that haven’t been treated with the pesticides. I’ve heard from a lot of people who have called, visited and emailed garden centers and nurseries locally and nationally asking about the use of neonics.
Stories vary widely with some places eagerly sharing their plans to discontinue their own use of neonics and to seek out suppliers who will do the same. But I’ve also heard reports of a fair amount of denial and defensiveness. What you need to know is that it isn’t enough for a retailer to say THEY are not using neonics any longer on the plants that they grow. You also need to know whether the plants they get from outside suppliers are neonic free. Getting that information will take willingness and time on the part of the nursery and from what I’m hearing, it’s clear that not everyone is putting in the effort.
Read More»Turning Cattle Troughs Into Raised Bed Gardens
Of all the things in our landscape, I think the galvanized cattle troughs (also known as stock tanks) in our backyard get the most attention. Even in the winter when nothing is growing in them, their shapes and sheer size turn heads and provoke questions. We added them to what we’re now calling “our little farm” a couple of years back when we lost a huge oak, and I figured I’d take advantage of the sun to grow some vegetables. After starting with one trough, we added another last year and we’ll be getting one more in the next few weeks.
If you want to grow some food on a small, urban lot, you can’t beat these troughs for being easy to get going. You don’t have to build anything, and you don’t have to deal with turning depleted urban soil into something safe, nutrient-rich and workable enough to grow food in. They’re also affordable, durable and tall enough to be out of the way of hungry critters and peeing dogs.
People ask all the time where we got the troughs and how to turn one into a raised bed garden, so even though I wrote briefly about this a couple of years ago, I thought I’d explain the process more in-depth here since it’s the perfect time to get raised beds going for the season. Let’s start with where to buy them. Unless you are literally made of money, do not go to a boutique garden center for a livestock trough. You want to go where farmers buy stuff—Tractor Supply Co. and Fleet Farm.
If you want to grow things like tomatoes, peppers, beans and squash, get yourself a large trough. One of ours is four feet long and the other is six feet. Both are 2 feet wide and 2 feet deep, and they cost about $80 and $110, respectively. Aside from getting the things home in the back of the car, the biggest job is drilling holes in the bottom for drainage. Use a bit that can drill through metal that’s about the size of a dime of nickel. We drilled holes every few inches all around the outside edge along the bottom, and then added many more holes going across the bottom of the trough from end to end and side to side. Remove the drain plug, too, since you won’t be needing it.
Once you’ve got your holes drilled, flip the trough over and put it wherever you want it because once you fill it with soil, you won’t be able to move it around without taking most of that soil back out. We don’t like things looking all kittywampus so we used a level to make sure the trough was lined up properly once we got it situated. (You don’t have to do that unless you’re bugged by such things.) Now comes the soil part. My advice—don’t cut corners. Good soil makes all the difference when you’re growing anything.
Because these are containers, albeit huge ones, you want a mix that’s going to drain well. You also want to provide plants with some nutrients that you’ll boost over time by adding compost and fertilizer. You’ll save some money if you make your own mix by combining 1 part topsoil, 1 part compost and 1 part coconut coir or coarse sand (also known as builder’s sand). I’ve done this by combining these things in batches in a wheelbarrow and it worked well. But I’ll admit, it’s a heck of a lot less work to call someone and have a quality potting mix delivered to your driveway. That way, you can just shovel it into a wheelbarrow and take it right over to your trough and other containers.
What do I mean by a quality mix? As I’ve said in the past, I’ve learned a lot about soil and compost over the last few years and I’m now opting to go with products that are organic or at least produced by a company or farmer who is willing to explain their process so I can make an informed decision about whether to use it. (For much more on that topic, see my blog post on safe compost.
Local organic growers give products from Purple Cow Organics, COWSMO and Mississippi Topsoil high marks. Other local sources that come highly recommended are Kern Landscape Resources and Kelley and Kelley Nursery. Compost from our Linden Hills organics recycling program is also pretty good. But because it includes packaging, paper and other odd bits, I don’t use it to grow edibles. That’s just me. Keep in mind that even though it’s costly to fill your trough with quality potting mix the first year, in subsequent years (unless you get some dreaded disease like early blight of tomatoes) you’ll only need to add a bit more compost to keep soil healthy. If you feel like you’re having drainage issues, add more coir or sand. With the hard part behind you—all you have to do is keep growing.