New Condo Tower For the Worms

Worm Factory® 360

I’ve written about my worm bin a few times over the past several months, so some of you probably know that I started vermicomposting back in February. I’ve wanted to try composting with worms ever since I read Amy Stewart’s book, The Earth Moved: On the Remarkable Achievements of Earthworms, a few years back.

I opted to start simply with one of those inexpensive plastic storage tub bins that don’t have stackable trays like the more high-tech worm bins do. With the tub, you just layer some shredded newspaper and other things worms like for bedding in the bottom, add red wigglers and then keep them fat and happy with kitchen scraps so they’ll eat, poo and reproduce until you have a bin filled with nutrient-rich worm compost to use on your plants.

After three months, I can definitely say that the tub system worked just fine. It didn’t smell, the worms seemed healthy and food was definitely being turned into vermicompost (poo). But I have to say that I got tired of digging around in a big bin full of decomposing food scraps to see the worms in action. Amy Stewart wrote a lot about how much she enjoyed sipping her morning coffee while watching her worms enjoy eating things like banana peels, and I wanted to do things like that too.

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.

Macy’s Flower Show 2012

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.

Our Silly Book Trailer Got a Nice Mention on Garden Rant

The publishing world has changed a lot in recent years, and if you haven’t already seen one, book trailers are one of the many things publishers are asking authors to make these days. When Timber Press asked Jeff and me to make a trailer, we were happy to oblige.

The only problem was our mutual love of toilet humor turned out to be a bit over the top for the folks at the University of Minnesota where Jeff is a professor. So after a couple of attempts, we finally came up with a trailer that’s gross, but still tame enough to get a thumb’s up.

Amy Stewart at Garden Rant was kind enough to post the trailer after she watched it this week. Thanks, Amy! Go here to see Amy’s post on Garden Rant and here’s the video if you’d like to see that, too.

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.

Do Your Homework Before Ordering Mason Bees

With honeybee populations declining in recent years, gardeners have been searching for ways to encourage other pollinators to stop by and help out. One pollinator I hear mentioned more and more often is mason bees, and seed catalogs are increasingly offering all kinds of mason bee nesting boxes. They’re cute, these little bee condo things with all those little round holes. So I got to thinking I should buy one.

But then I stopped myself, wondering if it was okay to just introduce mason bees to my garden, my neighborhood, Minnesota? I emailed Jeff Hahn, a helpful entomologist with the University of Minnesota Extension Service, and he said he didn’t know a lot about mason bees. But he recommended I talk with Joel Gardner, a grad student who is studying them.

How a New Gardener Got Bamboozled by Catalog Shenanigans

Of all the seed and plant catalogs that pile up on my desk this time each year, Klehm’s Song Sparrow  is my favorite with Baker Creek coming in a close second. The gorgeous, color photography is what hooks me in both cases.

Though I admit that the fact that I can get actual plants rather than just seeds makes Klehm’s close to my heart, too. Some years, I just don’t feel like firing up the seed-starting setup in the basement. I want that spring miracle of small boxes showing up at the door filled with seedlings smelling of wet peat and dirt.

When I was just starting out as a gardener, I didn’t think much about the difference between catalogs. While most have actual photos and detailed plant information, others use illustrations at least some of the time. Catalogs in the latter group are not always to be tossed in the recycling bin straight away, but I learned after some painful planting mishaps that some were not to be trusted.

Some Things To Know About Japanese Beetles

For five years now I’ve fussed over bare-root sprigs and cuttings of Virginia creeper, nursing them into the lush vines that now cover three arbors and a couple of fences at my house. This week, I started ripping all those vines out because, sadly, Japanese beetles just love Virginia creeper. For a while, my husband and I thought we could live with the damage the beetles do —all those green leaves reduced to lacy brown ghosts of their former selves. But when scads of beetles and showers of the dust-like poo they leave behind started raining down from the arbor into our hair every time we shut the back gate, well, goodbye vines.

For those who aren’t familiar with Japanese beetles, they are actually quite fetching little bugs. Dime-sized with shiny purple-green bodies, they almost look like something a wacked-out artificial intelligence researcher would create in a sci-fi film. First spotted in 1968 in Minnesota, as well as on the East Coast, Japanese beetles have since plagued eastern states, primarily, while slowly making their way westward. Larvae, or grubs as they’re usually called, feed on the roots of turf grass and adult beetles feed on a wide variety of ornamental plants.