I’m a wannabe Westerner, a city girl in search of greener pastures, always climbing trees just to get high, climbing the mountain to see what I can see. My father claims that my first word was “horse,” an unfortunate choice on my part since I grew up in Manhattan—not the town fifteen miles from where I live now in Bozeman, Montana, but the island between the Hudson and East rivers.
So it’s got to be one of life’s great ironies that here in the wide open West, I’m struggling to raise vegetables on a small urban lot with more than its share of trees. Is this fair? Is this right? I mean, really. I spend my NYC childhood reading Laura Ingalls Wilder and dreaming of the West, and I finally get here, I make it, I SUCCEED, and here I am, in a quintessentially Western town, all ranches and skiing, and I have less space than I did at my halfway-to-Montana house, in Minnesota.
Nonetheless, I persevere—bravely, nobly, humbly.
—Kate Gardner
themanicgardener@gmail.com
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Hello,
I enjoy your gardening website and thought you and your readers might be interested in an interactive version (using google maps) of the current USDA zone hardiness map at http://www.plantmaps.com/usda_hardiness_zone_map.php
There are also detailed interactive zone maps for each US State such as Montana for example:
http://www.plantmaps.com/interactive-montana-usda-plant-zone-hardiness-map.php
There is a detailed zipcode to zone search using the latest US postal service zips and giving the reader their zone down to the sub zone level (a or b). By entering your zipcode you can also get first/last freeze, Heat Zones, drought conditions and annual climatology for your area.
You can also embed the zip to zone search in your website using the plantmaps widget at http://www.plantmaps.com/hardiness-zone-zipcode-search-widget.php
Thanks
Humbly? Humbly? HA!
Love, Sally
Wow, a gardening blog from my piece of the world, not zone 9!
Looking forward to keeping up with you from my place, south of Whitehall.
I am sort of an opposite gardener. 20 acres of grass, rocks and wind, no trees,
just the few bushes that have survived our planting and my soon to be assembled
greenhouse. It was put together in the fall, but winds prevented putting it on its
foundation, so it is spending the winter, such as it is so far, lashed to the pergola.
Great blog. Is Gardner your real name? Very fitting if Gardner is your name.
Hi there only just discovered your podcast, it’s really good. Any plans to make anymore?
There was a book on sawdust lawns in the 1980s. When you could get old sawdust I put in 3 sawdust lawns which turned out great. You need to compensate for the low nitrogen in the sawdust by adding a high nitrogen fert. I used 4 inches of sawdust on top of the nitrogen and rototilled as deep as possible . Last year I did my lawn which was a mix of clay and sand. I had to use new sawdust which needed more fertilizer. Worked great!! I have the best soil in the neighborhood. Planing on doing a clay lawn this month.
Dear Kate
I have recently discovered your podcast and just wanted to sent you some fan mail. I’m sure you know how awesome you are, but in case you need a reminder, you are AWESOME. Some of these podcasts I think, what strange people that you’re interviewing… but with your amazing style you amplify the information that they have to share and keep things so colourful and light. Even when a podcast is all about frost and snow which is 100% not applicable to my South African coastal context I find that I keep listening because you draw links to such a broad range of topics. And I just enjoy the sense of fun and learning that you have adopted for yourself and that you live out in your interviews.
I’m learning a lot, mostly about gardening but also to my surprise, about appreciating strange and diverse people and about facilitating a good conversation.
I’ll obviously be sad when I run out of podcasts but I can only imagine how much time and effort these must have taken to put out into the world, and I’m just glad you did it.