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Colder temperatures means we’re stoking a hotter fire for cozy winter reading. Hungry to beef up your gardening chops for spring? Our Northern Gardener staff…
It’s the perfect food and habitat for jumping worms. Before you reach for those bags of wood chips or bark mulch in the spring, you…
As the onset of cool, autumnal winds pushes out the corn-sweatingly sweltering summer, we northern gardeners enter one of the most fleetingly beautiful times of…
Gardeners don’t need special shoes and clubs like golfers do, and we don’t have topricey rods and reels like anglers or a fancy bike, helmet…
One of the most important things us cold-climate gardeners need to know? Our plant hardiness zone. Cold hardiness zones are established by the U.S. Department…
Ed. note: This article supplements a larger feature on community gardening in the Fall 2025 issue of Northern Gardener. Learn more about how you may…
Happy Summer! Is it ever not a challenging growing season? In classic upper midwest fashion, we’ve swung from one extreme to the other. I’ve got…
Full sun is usually described as six to eight hours of sunlight per day. But some gardens may be sunny eight, 10 or even 12…
My daughter, the conservation biologist, gave me a packet of American Lotus seeds for Christmas. A native of shallow lakes, ponds, quiet streams and backwaters…
Many of the plants in your garden will never need pruning. An entire summer of vegetable gardening can go by without any thought of pruning,…
With the winter of 2023-24 on track to be one of the warmest, if not the warmest winter ever recorded in Minnesota, what’s a gardener…
I won a copy of Marianne Willburn’s inviting book on tropical plants at a gardening event last fall. The author cheerfully signed it for me,…
When the USDA-Agriculture Research Service and Oregon State University released the updated map of plant hardiness zones for the United States, there was a collective…
It’s tomato season! Delicious tomatoes, sun-ripened and fresh from the vine—what’s better than that? Of course, any gardening endeavor produces questions, and you may be…
When it comes to growing vegetables, peas just don’t get the credit they deserve. According to data from the National Gardening Association, 86 percent of…
Picture this. It’s early June, you have a sprinkling of new seedlings in the ground and forecasters are predicting frost overnight. Don’t panic. It seems…
I like winter, okay? I like having a little break from weeding and watering and I love having a break from the heat. But, dang….
It’s spring break season. Maybe you’re on your way to a tropical location, or you have a trip planned later this year to a unique…
What’s your garden zone? Do you ever try to cheat it? I rarely do. Most of the plants I grow that belong in warmer zones…
Revised July 2025 Since dahlias are native to Mexico, it’s not surprising that they can’t survive our winters here. What makes them so popular with…
If you’re reading this, you have a special relationship with making things appear from dirt. To some, it would seem an odd obsession, but to…
The intensely seasonal nature of the greenhouse and nursery industry in our region means that many gardeners only shop for plants in spring and early…
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