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.

New Plants for 2012

Pterocephalus depressus

Touting new plants always makes me a little nervous because, honestly, nobody really knows for sure how they’re going to do in their first few seasons. Still, I can’t resist trying a few each year, and most do pretty well as long as I mostly stick to plants that can survive in my hardiness zone (4).

Oh, I’ve tried pushing that zone with mixed success. Several different types of lavender have done surprisingly well in different spots in my yard over the years. But butterfly bush—dead, always dead, dead as a dead thing can be.

Oh, well. I remain undaunted. This season I plan to tempt fate with a pretty, carpeting pincushion flower (Pterocephalus depressus). This new introduction is native to Morocco and it’s low growing enough to be used as a groundcover or in between stones on a path. But it would also look good as a border or in the front of beds.

Foliage is gray-green and described as having a bit of a “crinkled” look, which doesn’t sound so hot but looks good in photos. Blooms are pink and mauve and they last from late spring through mid-summer. Gardeners are advised to let the flowers dry so we can enjoy the silver-tinged seed heads. Plant in full sun in well-drained soil. Zones 5 – 9.

Good, Safe Choices for Raised Beds

Yep, you’re right. That is a galvanized cattle trough and my husband Mike and I used one like this to create our first raised-bed garden in the backyard last weekend.

People often ask me what they can use to make raised beds and these galvanized troughs are the first thing that come to mind. Relatively inexpensive ($89 for a 4′ x 2′ x 2′ tank) and durable, livestock tanks make it possible for gardeners to create raised beds quickly and easily.

We got ours because we’d like to grow vegetables and herbs free from pee—and worse—and our lie that the backyard kitchen garden has an electrified fence around it no longer fools our dog, Lily. Troughs are also a great solution if you’ve got poor soil and you don’t want to have to amend a large area. Wall-to-wall cement outside your apartment? No problem. Plop a galvanized tank down, drill some holes in the bottom and you’ve got yourself a garden.

Is It Safe To Use Rain Barrel Water on Edibles?

This past weekend I did a couple of presentations at the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum that had nothing to do with growing edible plants. And yet, on the breaks in between the talks, the number one thing everyone asked me about was how to grow something at home that they could eat.

Washing my hands in the bathroom, snarfing a quick sandwich next to my car in the parking lot, struggling to get my PowerPoint to work — it didn’t matter where I was or what I was doing, people really wanted to know things about growing food.

I honestly lost count of how many times I was asked whether it was safe to use water from rain barrels on edibles. Time after time, though, I told people the same thing: I wouldn’t do it. Though there are few studies on what’s in the water inside rain barrels, research has shown that it often contains chemicals from roof runoff and air pollution, as well as bird poo, mold, fungi and other stuff that sounds unappetizing at the very least.

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.

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.

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.

Growing Herbs Indoors

One of the things I love most about summer is having an herb garden right outside my back door. Oregano, basil, dill, tarragon, sage, lavender, parsley and several kinds of thyme are right there ready to snip and toss into soup, salad or whatever we’re making, anytime. Sadly, having fresh herbs at the ready is just a six-month pleasure here in the Arctic, so in recent years I’ve been trying to grow herbs indoors once the weather starts to turn cold. I say “trying” because, honestly, it has been a bit trying, literally. But I’ve worked out some kinks and I’d like to share what I’ve learned with you now.

By far, the biggest challenge when growing herbs indoors is lighting. I’ve read, and people have told me, that it’s possible to grow some herbs fairly well in a sunny window. I say those people don’t live in Minnesota in the winter — or maybe they try to see the good in spindly plants where I’m more in the “off with their spider-mite-infested heads” camp. There is one exception: chives. Chives do last a long time when grown in a sunny spot, and you can snip off what you need for months as long as you leave at least 2 inches of growth on the plant.

Growing Veggies in Containers

You don’t have to have a plot of land to grow veggies. I’m happy to say that there are plenty of edibles that can be grown in containers right on a patio, front stoop or even a balcony. But there are a few good tips to know if you want to be successful.

Because these pots will be part of your outdoor living space for the whole season, you may want to take some time to choose some you’d really enjoy looking at every day. As you shop, keep in mind that small pots will dry out very quickly in the hot summer sun. Even if you are home and can water a couple of times a day, your plants are likely to wind up stressed out if they’re constantly drying out and being water over and over again. That’s why I’d recommend going with pots no smaller than 14–16 inches in diameter and at least a foot deep. Bigger is even better, but they’ll be hard to move — even with one of those rolling plants stands from IKEA that I mentioned last month. (Don’t use any container that doesn’t have a good drainage hole.)