Thursday, August 13, 2026

Recent VEGarden Posts

Sunflowers from Johnny's Selected Seeds, possible candidates for our fall wedding flowers
25 Mar 2011
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Growing wedding flowers

I mentioned in an earlier post that Chris and I have an upcoming wedding! September 10th, actually. This has changed up the garden plans slightly, as I would like to grow most of the flowers for our wedding. It’s a fall wedding, and will take place outside, so sunflowers are fitting. We’ve had good luck with sunflowers in the past, and I think we can add some daisies to the mix. Here are a few pictures of the smaller sunflower varieties we grew last year. The yellow flowers are dwarf varieties, Sunny Smile, from Johnny’s Selected Seeds. They produced beautiful 6″ flowers, with dark centers. The orange variety escapes me now; it was a random sunflower packet I picked up...
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Thyme growing in the Minnesota Garden on March 21st
22 Mar 2011
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More Signs of Spring

Catnip, the earliest spring herb: Also, it looks like the thyme wasn’t even phased by 4 months of freezing weather and more than four feet of snow. Ready to use!
Puck in the garden, with Onions and Poppies
21 Mar 2011
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Signs of Spring

Before the weekend, we still had 6″ of snow covering the ground. It’s amazing how fast things change this time of year! Of course, CBS says that we may see 3-5″ of white stuff again this week… but the season is definitely changing. Chris has found a lot of neat things sprouting in his garden already and has plans to put in potatoes soon. Actually, he may have been out there seeding lettuce and other cool crops this weekend. My garden is finally cleared from snow, so I took some time to investigate. Apparently we missed some onions. Last year we also found some onions we missed, and they produced some stunning flowers. Here’s our resident model showing off what...
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14 Mar 2011
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Ordering Seeds and Trees

I’ve been slowly working on ordering seeds for this year. The envelope is already sealed on my order from Sandhill Preservation Center in Iowa.  I will post what I got when I plant it.  But I am excited to try the sweet potatoes I ordered from them. I am still looking for a good paste tomato to plant.  I will also be trying out Stupice, which I ordered from Bountiful Gardens last year.  It is an early tomato that is supposed to produce throughout the season.  Most of my tomatoes are going to planted from seed outside.  Thats a blog post for another day… I have also ordered some trees.  I have hazelnuts, chestnuts and hickories on order from Badgerset. ...
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2011 Tomatoes and Peppers
06 Mar 2011
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Coconut Fiber vs. Peat Moss

It’s that time of year again! 10 weeks until Minnesota’s average last frost. We like to put stuff out earlier than that if the weather permits. I have a lot of plans for the garden this year – including growing the flowers for our wedding this September! I’ll have to post more about that later. I also ordered 100 grape vines, and Chris ordered some nut trees so I’m sure this summer we will be busy planting. There is a nice little nursery just down the road, so to save some time I am planning on just purchasing a lot of transplants from them. There are a few varieties that we just can’t pick up locally though: heirloom tomatoes, fancy...
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17 Feb 2011
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Purple Sprouting Broccolli is Sprouting

I grew some Purple Sprouting Broccoli last year, but, just as I feared, it never made any of its famed, delicious broccoli heads.  It did grow to be quite the plant.  So I took the greens for eating, chopped the stalk low to the ground and buried it in logs and snow.  Here it is after digging it out yesterday: Thats enough for me to pretend like it is already Spring.  And here is an area where Puck and I walked to as the sun set.  The plants are mullein gone to seed:
Fun mushroom statues from Pier 1 Imports
12 Feb 2011
2

Mushroom Statues: a neat find at Pier 1

If you know me well, you know I’m not into kitschy items or nicknacks… but I have been looking for mushroom statues for the garden for a long time now. Specifically, red-capped mushrooms. Everything I’ve found is either really small or kind of ugly. I had a gift certificate to Pier 1 Imports, which used to be one of my favorite stores. I spent nearly an hour there a few weeks ago trying to spend the gift certificate, and the only thing I could find was a mirror. (Which Chris thinks is ugly, hah). Last weekend we went to Sawatdee for dinner and passed a Pier 1 store. We stopped in, and just about left without purchasing anything – when...
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Lemon Queen Sunflower
09 Feb 2011
1

Thinking of Spring ….

We took advantage of the nice 25ºF weather last weekend and brought Puck out for a lot of long walks. Apparently, my legs aren’t used to that kind of exercise yet, and I now have a stress fracture in my right leg. There isn’t much that can be done about it, except for staying off of it and walking lightly for 4 weeks. Fortunately I spend 10 hours at a desk every day anyway, so that shouldn’t be too hard. It was a chilly 10 below when I woke up this morning, with wind chills well below that. Bitter cold, but a heat wave compared to the -27ºF air temps we had a few weeks ago. The forecast is suggesting...
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Still eating garden vegetables! We just finished the rest of our cabbage and onions, and have a lot of carrots and potatoes left.
08 Feb 2011
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Still eating garden veggies!

I used up the last of our red cabbage and onions the other week. We still have nearly an entire crisper drawer in the fridge full of carrots, which are surprisingly still crispy – and delicious! We have a grocery bag of them in the garage too – since they are frozen they aren’t good for eating raw, but they do work well in soups. We need to figure out a better storage method for carrots this year. We do have a second refrigerator in the garage, but I don’t know if we’ll have enough extra food to justify turning it on. We still have quite a few potatoes, but even keeping them covered in the cool crawl space didn’t...
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SproutMaster 8x10 Sprouting Tray
07 Feb 2011
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Mung bean sprouts

A delicious way to enjoy fresh grown food in the winter: sprouts! I received two of these 8×10 Sproutmaster Trays for Christmas this year. They are stackable, and each come with a divider – so with the two trays, we can sprout up to 4 different kinds of sprouts at once! Or you can stagger start dates and always have a fresh supply. They store really well in the refrigerator too. This weekend, we stopped by Fresh & Natural Foods, and I saw these dried sprouted mung beans sold in the snack aisle. I think we’ll have to take out the dehydrator soon to give that a try!
15 Jan 2011
2

A Long Answer to a Short Question on Fruit Trees in Sandy, MN

I got a question on our facebook page from John about planting fruit trees in the Anoka Sand Plain.  My answer got too long so I am putting it here: John I can tell you what I have done and plan to do.  take it with a grain of salt because we just moved here and just planted fruit trees this year… compost:  i priced out compost from plaisted and the price was quite a bit higher than the municipal place in coon rapids. that might change if you were ordering larger quantities than i did.  if you go with them i’d ask plaisted if they have tested their compost and can send you the report. i also bought some...
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Jessi's first draft for the garden - 2011 season
15 Jan 2011
1

Jessi’s 2011 Garden: first draft

When I look out my office window, the first thing I see is a 2′ mound of snow, sparking from the fresh flakes that fell yesterday. But the seed catalogs have been coming in (we left for a week over the holidays, and came home to at least 10 new garden catalogs!), so we’ve been spending a lot of time talking about this year’s garden plans. One of the things I love to do every winter is draw out my garden. You can click here to view the full sheet as a PDF, with some of the varieties I’m thinking about. I want to expand my perennial herb beds, stretching them across two rows on either side of the arbor....
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17 Dec 2010
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Work

“The novelist Nigel Balchin, was once invited to address a conference on ‘incentives’ in industry. He remarked that ‘Industrial psychologists must stop messing about with tricky and ingenious bonus schemes and find out why a man, after a hard day’s work, went home and enjoyed digging in his garden.”
05 Dec 2010
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Update from Chris (not in the third person)

Well, it looks like I haven’t posted since June.  I wouldn’t say I’ve been busy exactly.  Just kinda forgot about this place.  I am going start posting more often.  Even so thanks to Jessi we are one of the world’s leading websites for yellow sweet dumpling squash and bean trellis content. I have been doing a lot of reading about permaculture since this fall and have lots of plans for nut trees, berries and guilds and the like for spring. I have some thoughts about this past year I plan to write up later.  As you can see from this picture c. October (my garden is in the background) there wasn’t a whole lot growing in the fall.  There was...
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The garden after a nice heavy coat of snow
30 Nov 2010
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Winter Wonderland

As great as it would be to have a nice, long growing season … I wouldn’t have it any other way! The 2011 Seed and Fruit catalogs are already rolling in, and Chris picked up a stack of gardening books from the book store the other day. Winter is a great season for gardeners. It gives us time to think about previous years, and dream about the new things we want to try in the spring. (Artichokes, perhaps? We read a very interesting article in one of Chris’s books about growing artichokes in cold climates). One of the things that I’ve been researching is the best – and quickest – way to make our fence green. We put up a...
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Collard Greens (and Puck, of course!)
13 Nov 2010
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Brussels Sprouts and Collard Greens

These are two terrific plants that can handle a hard freeze and 4″ of snow. These pictures were taken last week, before we had finished clearing out the garden. This morning we woke up to a white yard. I picked the Brussels sprouts last night, and Chris was just outside in the snow picking the collards before they disappeared into the winter. He also picked the greens from his sprouting broccoli, which taste pretty similar to collards. I think we have enough greens to last us until spring!
Onions
07 Nov 2010
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Carrots & Onions

We’ve spent much of the weekend outside, working on cleaning up the yard and garden before it snows. I finally picked all of the carrots and onions, and they are stored for winter. The soil at our old house was mostly clay, so we’ve never had much luck with root crops. Now, we live on the “Anoka County Sand Plain” and the the root crops did well this year. The addition of compost helped a lot. We’re considering getting another load year but haven’t decided yet. I should have picked the onions a while back, as they died off mid-summer and some were starting to grow shoots again. We go through a lot of onions in our house though, so...
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