Author Archives: Meleah Maynard

Meleah Maynard

About Meleah Maynard

My name is Meleah Maynard and I garden in crazy-ass cold, zone 4 Minneapolis, Minnesota. My first book, co-authored with Jeff Gillman, Decoding Gardening Advice: The Science Behind the 100 Most Common Recommendations, was recently published by Timber Press. I don't have a hort degree. I'm a longtime journalist and master gardener who loves asking people questions, doing research and learning something new every day. I hope you like my blog here on GardenDrum and you read my full blog at Everyday Gardener

Are you also a plant whisperer?

Meleah Maynard
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I love gardening, but once September comes to my Zone 4 garden, I admit I’m ready to start packing things up and settling in for winter when I can get back to other things I enjoy, like reading. That being the case, I tend to get an early start on doing things like tossing spent annuals and vegetables in the compost bin. While I’m doing that, I try to give away plants I’ve got too many of or don’t like anymore—I finally gave away that dreadful Vanilla Strawberry hydrangea (Hydrangea paniculata ‘Renhy’) I’ve been complaining about forever. Honestly, it’s a gorgeous plant in many ways, but the huge flower heads spend most of their time hanging down like the noggins of pouting children. Not. For. Me. Continue reading →

Second Bloom: Betty Ann Addison’s encore nursery

Meleah Maynard
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Betty Ann Addison was preparing to say goodbye to her beloved, 16-acre nursery, Rice Creek Gardens, when I first met her in 2006. After 20 years, rising taxes and assessments had made running the park-like nursery she and her late husband, Charles, opened on the site of a former junkyard in Blaine a losing proposition. Her eyes were sad, but the joy she felt as she pointed out specific plants, many of which she and Charles had hybridized themselves, Continue reading →

Watch the monarch butterfly pupate

Meleah Maynard
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So many magical things happen when caterpillars turn into butterflies. Recently, our neighbors Dale Hammerschmidt and Mary Arneson managed to get some great pictures of the monarch butterflies they often raise indoors to help protect them from predators. They said it was okay to share them, so here you are. Thanks Dale and Mary! Continue reading →

Edible plants to grow in the shade

Meleah Maynard
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Want to grow vegetables and herbs even though you don’t have full sun? No problem. You just need to choose edibles that don’t depend on six hours or more of baking sunlight to thrive. So, yes, tomatoes are out, as are peppers, squash and eggplant, because plants grown for their fruit really do need a minimum of six hours of good sun per day. Continue reading →

New plants for crazy cold USDA Zone 4

Meleah Maynard
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Whew! I apologize for disappearing for so long. A family member has been ill for several months, and I haven’t had time to post. Things haven’t really calmed down, but I’m going to try to get back in the groove of writing more regularly so, here goes: Let’s talk about new plants for 2015. Or more specifically, new plants that can survive Minnesota’s horrifyingly cold, Zone 4 climate. For those of you who live where it’s even colder, I’ve got a few plants that are hardy to Zones 2 and 3. If you live in much warmer climates, you have the opposite problem. So you’ll want to check to see how much heat the plants I’m talking about can take before you buy them. Continue reading →

How to make a dragonfly garden

Meleah Maynard
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My dad told all kinds of fantastical stories when I was a kid, and I believed all of them. To this day, I can’t drive past a “Watch For Falling Rock” sign without thinking about the Native American hero named Falling Rock, who disappeared in the desert and was never seen again. If I had kids, I would tell them stories about dragonflies, something about how a magic spell of some sort turned big-eyed, prehistoric beasts into delicate winged creatures that really like water. Continue reading →

My garden verges on law breaking

Meleah Maynard
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For me, the words “neighborhood sweep” bring to mind the busting up of meth labs and prostitute rings, or maybe less dramatically, a big litter cleanup day in which everybody pitches in. But on Friday, we got a letter from the City of Minneapolis Department of Regulatory Services Housing Inspection Services Division advising us that we were being cited in response to a NEIGHBORHOOD SWEEP (yes, all caps) for the “conditions” of the gardens along the sidewalk on one side of our house. Continue reading →

Neonicotinoid-free plants – buyer BEWARE!

Meleah Maynard
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I generally try to avoid writing a lot about the same issue for fear of boring people to death or seeming like a nutter who can’t stop ranting about one thing or another. In the case of neonicotinoid pesticides, though, I’ve received so many calls and emails on this topic since I started writing about it a few months back, (see my previous post) I feel like updates are wanted and needed. So I’m going to go with that feeling and tell you more about what I’ve learned lately in hopes that this will help answer some questions you may have now that you’ve likely learned more about this issue too. Continue reading →

The search for plants that won’t harm bees

Meleah Maynard
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In the midst of the worst winter—ever—it’s hard to think about flowers, I know. But this time of year, I normally order a few plants for spring delivery from catalogs and I’m having to spend a lot more time on that than usual because I want to make sure that the flowers I’m ordering aren’t going to kill the bees that visit my gardens. By now you’ve probably heard that many of the pollinator-friendly plants and flowers that we’ve been filling our gardens with over the last few years may actually be harming, and even killing, bees. Continue reading →

Experimenting with grafted tomatoes

Meleah Maynard
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Grafted tomatoes, especially heirlooms, were really hot this year. Why graft heirlooms? Well, the reasoning is that by grafting the heirlooms we love—Brandywines, Green Zebras, Cherokee Purples, Mortgage Lifters—to a rootstock that’s got, say, great drought tolerance or disease resistance, you get what amounts to a super heirloom. Continue reading →

Down with gardening snobbery

Meleah Maynard
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As a garden writer, I read a lot of gardening blogs and articles by other writers and landscape designers and I have to say, I’m finding them increasingly annoying and depressing. So much judgment and negativity—who died and made us the arbiters of all things right and tasteful? Continue reading →

The rise of urban beekeeping

Meleah Maynard
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I am severely allergic to bee venom, so I’ve always been careful when gardening to stay out of the flower beds during the times of day when bees are most active. Sadly, that’s been easy to do this year because there are no bees in my garden, save for some tiny, tiny bees that my grandma used to call “sweat bees.” There are no honeybees or bumblebees, just a lot of large scary-looking brown wasps that, like cockroaches, look as though they could survive an apocalypse. Continue reading →