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.
Please bring some seeds to share!
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.
Seed art from the State Fair.
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.
Pencils and small envelopes are inside the library for you to use.
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?”
Betty Ann Addison sells many unique and hard-to-find plants in her backyard every season.
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.”
Betty Ann propagates many of the plants she sells herself.
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.
Betty Ann hybridizing rhododendrons at her home.
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»No Mothballs In the Garden
- On August 03, 2015
- By Meleah
- In Uncategorized, Veggies, What In Tarnation?
- 5
You know me: I often write about the prevalence of bad gardening advice so, hey, here I go again. This time, let’s talk about how often we gardeners hear stuff that’s either dangerous, or stupid or both. Got a tree stump you need to remove? “Pour gasoline on it,” I’ve heard more than one gardener advise. PLEASE don’t do that. Need to get rid of moles? “Stuff Juicy Fruit chewing gum in their holes,” advise ill-informed people who believe the story that the gum, lord knows how many sticks, will cause intestinal blockage. It won’t, but even if it did, don’t do this either.
Seriously, people, moles don’t even like Juicy Fruit. A nice pinot grigio will do nicely, though. And look how cute I am! Credit: iStock
And here’s another thing you ought not do—use mothballs outdoors. (Honestly, though, who wants to wear sweaters and use blankets that smell like mothballs either?) Anyway, I have no idea who first started running about telling gardeners that mothballs are great for curtailing outdoor pest problems, but the strategy has been around a long time and is still going strong, according to my latest Google search. The trouble is, though it does work, it’s a federal offense to use mothballs for an off-label reason such as animal control. And there are a lot of good reasons for that.
Regulated by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, mothballs are pesticides capable of harming all living things, including children and pets who may mistakenly eat them thinking they’re some kind of treat. Mothballs are also harmful to the environment because, as they deteriorate, they contaminate groundwater, soil and plants (the pesticides in mothballs bind to soil and are taken up by plants).
One of the many brands of mothballs for sale.
Labeled for use to kill moths and other pests that destroy fabric, mothballs are supposed to be used only in airtight containers. That’s because the vapor from their active ingredient, usually naphthalene or paradichlorobenzene , is toxic. As the fumes build up inside a closed container, the pesticide reaches a level that kills the moths.
When we smell the terrible stink of mothballs, however, we are the ones breathing in the pesticide fumes. And those fumes can affect our health in truly sucky ways, depending on which active ingredient the mothballs contain. Adults exposed to naphthalene or paradichlorobenzene vapors for short periods, for example, may experience nausea, dizziness, headaches and/or vomiting. Longer exposure has been linked to the development of hemolytic anemia, as well as kidney and liver damage. Naphthalene, according to the World Health Organization, may also cause cancer.
Young children exposed to mothballs containing either pesticide can develop fever, diarrhea and abdominal pain, especially if they have eaten them. Dogs who ingest naphthalene mothballs may become lethargic or experience diarrhea or tremors. Paradichlorobenzene mothballs have been linked to kidney and liver damage in pets.
If you want to learn more about the health effects of mothballs, go to the National Pesticide Information Center’s website.
Magical Monarchs
- On July 10, 2015
- By Meleah
- In Bugs, Natural Wonders, Uncategorized
- 0
So many magicsal things happen when caterpillars turn into butterflies. Recently, our neighbors Dale Hammerschmidt and Mary Arneson managed to get some great pictures of the monarch butterflies they often raise indoors to help protect them from predators. They said it was okay to share them, so here you are. Thanks Dale and Mary!
Shortly before the adult monarch emerges, the pupa gets very dark and you can see the wings inside.
Wait for the butterfly’s wings to dry before releasing him or her.
Growing Edibles In the Shade
Want to grow vegetables and herbs even though you don’t have full sun? No problem. You just need to choose edibles that don’t depend on six hours or more of baking sunlight to thrive. So, yes, tomatoes are out, as are peppers, squash and eggplant, because plants grown for their fruit really do need a minimum of six hours of good sun per day.
Lettuce will grow well, even in partial shade. Photo: Rhonda Hayes
But that still leaves a wide variety of edibles to choose from as long as you’ve got more than deep shape to work with—not much will grow under a maple tree’s canopy. But plants grown for their roots and flowers will produce with as little as three to six hours of full sun or consistent dappled sun. Beets, carrots, broccoli, cauliflower, onions, turnips and radishes, for example, can be successfully grown with four to six hours of sun. And though they produce fruit, I get a pretty good crop of cucumbers in 5 hours of sun.
Leafy veggies like kale, spinach, leaf lettuce, arugula, mustard greens and Swiss chard can get by with only two to four hours of sun—though they will grow more lush in sunnier locales. If you have a garden that offers both sun and shade, one of the advantages of knowing what can take less sun is the ability to increase your harvest by tucking these plants in along shaded borders that are often though of as wasted space.
Got four hours of good sunlight? Plant some Swiss chard.
Sure, there’s a lot to be said for the power of sun, but there are some benefits to growing vegetables in part shade. Crops like broccoli and cauliflower won’t bolt as quickly as they would in full sun, tender lettuces will last longer and you won’t have to water constantly, which is always a plus. That said, though, it is important to monitor moisture levels in shade gardens carefully because these sites are often located beneath big trees or shrubs, as well as the overhang of the house or garage. So even when it does rain, the water may not reach your garden, and much of what does fall will likely be taken up by the root systems of greedy trees and shrubs.
Read More»Great Gardening Books
If I were able to retire tomorrow, one of the first things I would do is read more. I already read a lot: I love books. But I could read a lot more if I didn’t work so, fingers crossed that we win the lottery sometime soon so I can get to the stacks and stacks of books taking up space all over our house.
One of the things I did manage to do recently was catch up on the books I’ve received to review. Here are some of my favorites. First, though, you’ll notice these books are not the latest, hot-off-the-press sort of thing. I read as I’m able and review some of what I like. If I don’t like something, I take my grandma’s advice to “not say anything if I can’t say anything nice.” I figure, just because I don’t like a book doesn’t mean you won’t. Why be a spoiler?
Beautifully Sustainable: Freeing Yourself to Enjoy Your Landscape (Be-Mondo Publishing, 2013), by Douglas Owens-Pike. I met Douglas several years ago when he invited me on a mini tour of some of the Minneapolis gardens his landscape design firm, EnergyScapes, had created in recent years. All of them were lovely and different from most “designed” gardens in the sense that were very natural, consisting mostly of native plants and arranged as if Mother Nature had done it herself. True to his company’s name, the landscapes were all created with resource conservation in mind.
Beautifully Sustainable (which can be purchased here: http://energyscapes.com/book/) is Douglas’ attempt to help gardeners at all levels make their landscapes more sustainable, and his smart, clearly explained ideas and tips are very useful. But I also appreciate how on a more subtle level, his book helps readers think more like a designer when visualizing outdoor areas: What sort of space would I really enjoy? What features matter to me most? What view do I want to see from my living room?
All of these questions seem easy, and they are. But most of us don’t think of them until the patio is poured or the pergola is built in what turns out to be the totally wrong place. “Take time to imagine,” he wisely suggests, before explaining how to create a map of your landscape long before you buy the first plant. Other chapters cover things like how to build healthy soil, create a rain garden, get rid of weeds without chemicals and how to maintain a landscape once its planted. In other words, there’s something for everyone in this helpful, enjoyable book.
For those who want to learn more about growing edibles in our climate, take a look at Emily Tepe’s The Edible Landscape: Creating a Beautiful and Bountiful Garden with Vegetables, Fruits and Flowers (Voyageur, 2013). Emily was doing fruit research at the University of Minnesota when she created an edible demonstration garden and fell in love with growing food.
There are lots of things to love about Emily’s book, but in particular I appreciate the way she accompanies her advice to incorporate edibles into gardens with colorful illustrations that show exactly how that can be accomplished beautifully. While the book is a general primer on growing edibles, the appendix includes an extensive list of edible plants specifically for northern gardeners. I found several varieties there that I’m going to try this year.
Gardeners who want to help support pollinators and other beneficial insects should check out Minnesota landscape designer Heather Holm’s fantastic book, Pollinators of Native Plants (Pollination Press, 2014). While the text sometimes made me reach for my botanical dictionary and refer to the glossary in the back of the book, Heather really did a great job of conveying complex subject matter in a relatable way. Don’t want to learn about the actual process of pollination? Skip to the descriptions of the many different creatures that visit flowering plants. Read up on bees and how they live and work together. Or jump right to the bulk of the book where native plants are described in detail along with the insects that are partial to them. The photos alone are outstanding.
But the information Heather offers about natives for three distinct habitats: prairies, woodland edges and wetland edges, can be used by all gardeners who want to attract pollinators. And isn’t that all of us at this critical time?
