
Garden Prep & Care

Composting
Would you like to save $$$ on your gardening expenses? Homegrown compost can be used to solve various garden challenges while saving you money from buying other product solutions in-store.

Cover Crops for the Home Garden
As you harvest the last of your vegetables and fruits late in the gardening season, open soil space becomes available in your garden. Why not try something new and fill those spaces with cover crops? Read more about cover crops in the home garden.

Deciphering Seed Catalogs
Seed catalogs start coming in January or February - a good time to start dreaming of your next garden!
But there is so much information packed into a seed catalog it can be hard to interpret the abbreviations and array of plant varieties. This article will help you to decipher your seed catalogs so that you can choose the best plants for your garden.

Garden in the Minnesota Winter with “Winter Sowing”
Itching to get planting? Even in our cold Minnesota we can start our spring gardens. Winter seed sowing is possible using homemade miniature greenhouses and plenty of snow. Here's how...

Imagining Your Garden’s Possibilities
January is a month of fresh starts, a time to renew and begin again. Whether you were pleased or frustrated with your garden in 2021, the new year is a great time to dream about your 2022 garden’s possibilities. Valerie Rogotzke shares some thoughts about how to reimagine your garden.

Putting Your Garden to Bed
If it’s yellow or brown, cut it down. If it’s green, leave it alone. This long-standing rule-of-thumb means you can’t just wake up one day and decide to put your garden to bed for the winter. It’s a gradual process because plants die back at different rates depending on when they transition energy to the roots. Cutting off green leaves can weaken a plant and affect its vigor and bloom next year. Besides, there are lots of reasons to avoid cutting shrubs, stems and perennials – for winter interest and for wildlife. Here are some ways to ready your gardens for cold and snow ahead.
Rain Gardens
Whether you live in a city or along a lake or river, managing storm water run-off is something to consider in your landscape. Read this article to finds ways to do it.

There's Always Next Year - Season End Reflections
Fall is a logical time to reflect upon how your garden fared during the growing season. What went right, what went wrong, what lessons were learned? This season presented ample opportunity to learn some gardening lessons. Conditions tested even the most experienced gardeners and the most established gardens. Read about some of the problems that one Master Gardener tackled this summer and some lessons learned.

To Till or Not to Till
One sure sign of spring for me as a young man was my father-in-law rototilling his vegetable garden. He’d fire up his trusty TroyBuilt and belching smoke and fumes, pulverize a good portion of his back yard. The resultant fluffy black soil seemed to invite planting.