Soil Testing: Not Such A Wonky Pain In the Butt Anymore
As a master gardener, one of the things I’m supposed to advise people to do is get a soil test before they start plopping plants in the ground. I admit that I’ve chafed against having to say this forever because, honestly, I’ve had a garden for 15 years and I’ve never tested my soil.
Also, I once asked a big group of master gardeners if any of them had tested their soil and not one of them had done it either. Instead, we all admitted to relying on the lazy gardener strategy of putting plants wherever we wanted to and just moving them someplace else if they didn’t do so well. Second time’s not a charm? Move that plant again, we say. After three strikes, hey, give the poor thing away to a new home where it might luck out and get more doting parents.
Read More»Macy’s Flower Show 2012
- On March 27, 2012
- By Meleah
- In Annuals, Indoor Gardening, Perennials
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Behold the topiary toucan. Please excuse the fisheye lens.
Every year, Macy’s teams up with Bachman’s, a local garden center, for a spring flower show on the department store’s eighth floor in downtown Minneapolis. I don’t recall how long the flower show has been going on, but I’m grateful that Macy’s carries on the tradition, which was started many years ago by Dayton’s and continued by Marshall Field’s.
It’s strangely warm in Minnesota this spring but, typically, the flower show comes at a time when seeing an actual plant in bloom is nothing short of amazing. This year’s theme is “Brasil: Gardens in Paradise” and admission, as always, is free.
There’s a lot to rave about this year, but I was most impressed by the gorgeous topiary toucan at the show’s entrance. Crafted by artists at Macy’s Parade Studio, the toucan features plumage made from “meticulously arranged” magnolia leaves. I’ll say! And what might all of those delicate flowers be on the bird’s beak and chest? Why those are thousands of Brazilian button flowers that were applied by Bachman’s floral designers.
Read More»Let the Vermicomposting Begin
Red wigglers getting settled in their new bin.
I have wanted a worm bin for years, ever since I read Amy Stewart’s great book: “And the Earth Moved: On the Remarkable Achievement of Earthworms,” to be exact. Yesterday, I finally bought one while attending “Burst Into Spring,” an annual lecture series put on by the Isanti County Master Gardeners.
I was invited to the event to speak about my new book, “Decoding Gardening Advice,” and over the lunch break I got to talking with Roger Welck from Princeton, Minnesota. He’d heard my talk and wanted to know why I’d discussed compost, but hadn’t covered vermicompost.
Time was the only reason, I told him. Vermicomposting is touched on in the book. But I’d removed those slides from the presentation for that day because it was kind of an involved topic, and I worried that I wouldn’t be able to fit it in. “Damn you!” he joked, gesturing toward his vendor table laden with bagged vermicompost, worms in buckets and worm bins.
Read More»Amaryllis
I have no idea what I was thinking trying to brighten up the winter by planting paperwhites in bowls filled with colorful glass marbles and water all these years. Yes, sure, the flowers are nice enough. But that sickly sweet smell they give off is worse than being trapped with a bunch of over-perfumed grannies in a hot elevator.
That’s why this year, even though red is my least-favorite color, I brought home a couple of big-ass amaryllis bulbs and gave them a try. (There are other colors, just not at my local garden center on the day that I thought I must buy some.) Wow! I’m going with these every year from now on. Not only do they have no smell, these long-blooming flowers—four from each bulb—are huge. And I have to say that even midlife-crisis-sports-car red has definitely lifted my spirits during this cold, gray stretch of the season.
Read More»Crocodile Fern
The crocodile fern (Microsorum musifolium ) really couldn’t be more aptly named. Exotic yet easy to grow as a houseplant (if you can find it), this fern has fronds that look remarkably like crocodile scales. I snapped this at our local conservatory, which was filled to bursting with Minnesotans looking to get out of the cold this weekend.
Of course if you live in a warmer place, you can also grow these outdoors. I’ve got a friend who says they carry crocodile ferns in big-box stores in the South. Luckies.
Gardening Indoors on Cold Winter Days
It’s been a warm winter by Minnesota standards, meaning it took until just this week to dip down into the single digits and, finally, below zero. As it usually does, those Arctic temps sent me straight to a couple of local garden centers where I could walk around indoors and be around plants and smell dirt. You don’t realize how much you miss the smell of dirt until you live in a place where it’s so cold there are no smells for months and months—okay, sure, the dog poo that I have to pick up still smells. And there is a nice smoke smell coming from neighbors’ chimneys sometimes. But that’s about it.
I hadn’t planned on buying anything. I really just wanted to be warm, see some green stuff and talk to the parrot, Baby, at one of my favorite gardening haunts. But two big tables of little, teeny succulents caught my eye at one place where I stopped. So I picked out a few, along with a bright yellow pot and a bag of soil specifically for cacti and succulents, and brought everything home to plant.
I don’t have an indoor planting spot at the moment since the basement’s a big mess, so I just worked on the island in our kitchen, which is probably kind of gross. But we have a dog and three cats living with us. It’s not that clean here anyway.
Once I was done planting, my husband Mike worked the same kind of magic he does in our yard by adding small pieces of driftwood and some rocks. The result looks kind of like a terrarium without a top. Situated on a little table, when the sun hits it just right, our little pot of succulents feels like a tropical oasis offering us relief from the bitter, white cold.
