Author: Michelle (Page 2 of 6)

We love bird baths AND we love our huge Rhubarb leaves—so we decided to combine them into this easy DIY Cement Rhubarb leaf bird bath!

We also had gigantic leaves and a partial bag of concrete at the same time as a broken bird bath bowl. So this was a project begging to be done!

This is DIY project is truly easy enough for the kids to help with. There’s a little prep, some fast action while pouring the cement onto the leaf, then patience while waiting to dry. The only fussy part is removing any stuck leaf material by scrubbing off the cement after it has set. From start to finish, ours took a few days to complete- and will last years!

Let’s get you growing rhubarb!

Rhubarb combines some serious garden nostalgia with punchy modern takes on how we eat it. There’s so much to love about this perennial plant, so let’s dig right in!

• First off, rhubarb is a vegetable, not a fruit, even though we treat it like one.
• Second, it was originally cultivated in the far east over 2,000 years ago and used medicinally, for cleansing the body, stomach issues and reducing fever.
• Thirdly, only eat the stalk. The leaves are toxic and contain oxalic acid, which can build up in the kidneys and cause kidney stones and even failure.

These local plant sales will start your garden off right! Good for your garden, the pollinators, your harvests and the community.

Plants grown for these sales are not treated with Neonicotinoid pesticides, are non-GMO, locally raised by experts- and the sales directly benefit some great gardening programs.

Listed in Chronological order- ladies and gentlemen, save these dates!

Local Plant Sales

Choosing local flowers can have as big an environmental impact as the food we buy!

With Mother’s Day coming up – which accounts for about 25% of all cut flower sales in the U.S. annually, I thought it was time to dig deeper into the dirty side of floriculture and look into the growing trend of local flowers…

Did you know that cut flowers are one of the biggest offenders when it comes to being sprayed with synthetic pesticides and herbicides. And with a nearly $60 billion industry in the U.S., Americans bring a lot of those sprayed blooms home and then seat themselves around them for meals…

One of my all-time favorite condiments has always been the slightly sweet, slightly vinegary and always crunchy pickled daikon + carrot ‘salad’. This is typical in Vietnamese dishes like Banh Mi and rice noodle salads. I’m also known to just eat this straight out of the jar.

I feel so lucky to have grown up around the Twin Cities where I’ve been able to savor all the flavors of the metro area. Growing up more on the east side of the metro, on the outskirts of St. Paul, I always had ample Vietnamese options. My dad used to work at the state capitol, and I would beg him to bring me to lunch at The Lagoon, an old school Vietnamese restaurant that used to be tucked in right there on University Avenue.