Here's how to grow seeds, grains and spices in your garden, plus other tips from gardener Meg Cowden

CATHY WURZER: Well, so far today, we've heard about flooding chances and the wintry mix that's still hovering over Minnesota. And, well, we just need a moment to think about spring and warmth and growing things just to lift the collective mood. So we're going to turn next to our resident gardener, Meg Cowden, who's getting ready for a huge and colorful garden this year. Hey, Meg. Welcome back. How are you?

MEG COWDEN: Hi. Hi, Cathy. It's great to be here. Thanks for having me.

CATHY WURZER: I know you're looking out the window and thinking, hm, OK. There's still some snow on the ground. But I'm betting your home is full of starter plants, right?

MEG COWDEN: Yes. The grow lights are on. The kitchen countertop is more of a garden than a place where we cook food right now. I'm starting lots of seeds. I've got lots-- I've got every stage of growth, really, going on inside right now ahead of the great migration to the garden.

CATHY WURZER: I'm wondering about the rain and the snow. I mean, obviously and the cold is holding back a lot of different things. How do you-- how might it affect what you plan on doing?

MEG COWDEN: Yeah. I'm behind what I would consider a normal year for me. I usually have plants already outside in my low tunnels by now that are transplants. And they're being hardened off right now, which means I'm slowly acclimating them to full sunlight and the outdoors. They actually are outside today, under cover, protected.

I'm going to bring them in tonight because 15 is a little too cold. They're all things that can handle a frost. But still, I invest in them and want them to have a fruitful life in the garden once they get there. So I'm behind about a week. And I usually have my peas in the ground by now. April 1, I usually sow really early carrots wherever I can get them in. And none of that happened last weekend. So--

CATHY WURZER: You mentioned--

MEG COWDEN: --but I mean, behind is a relative term. I'm a little afraid that we're going to go from behind to ahead. And then we're just going to-- bad terminology, but it's going to-- this spring, I feel like it's going to snowball on us weather-wise. It's going to warm up. It might warm up quickly and stay warm. So as always, I'm just along for the ride.

CATHY WURZER: Well, given what Paul Huttner said, our chief meteorologist, a few minutes ago, yeah. We might go from 0 to 60 literally in terms of from winter to spring just in the blink of an eye. Well, you mentioned tunnels. For folks who are not familiar with what your system is, what do you mean by tunnels?

MEG COWDEN: OK. Yeah. So a low tunnel is like a mini greenhouse. That's probably the best way to think of it. I use electrical metal conduit, and it's bent. And so those are bent in a nice arc. They're about four feet tall and about four feet wide, the width of our beds. And so then I fasten a really high-quality plastic to those. And I'm able to get a jump start on the season. I usually gain about four weeks on the growing season with those at least.

I put those up. Put the plastic on in the middle of February. And I did sow seeds under those tunnels on March 19, the last day of winter. And they germinated already. And they're out there. Growing is maybe a generous term for what they're doing today. But they are-- I do have some actual seeds that I've already planted in my garden that have germinated outdoors.

So I use these also for things like-- so that tunnel where I've seeded some things, I'm going to be putting my cabbages in there next week and broccoli and bok choy, kohlrabi. Those are the main things I'll put out there in those tunnels. And then I'm going to set up some more tunnels probably next week, once all the snow melts out of our garden. And start warming soil for things like my tomato transplants.

I use them as well to create a little extra edge for things like my tomatoes and peppers that really like it hot. So I leave them covered until probably sometime late May, early June, depending on how our spring develops and how warm we get because those plants are really just absolute heat lovers.

So in this way, I'm doing little bumps in the season in different parts of the garden where I want to have the effort. And I do that for earlier harvests usually is what I can gain from that. And so for things like peppers that produce for a really long time, it means more peppers for more weeks of summer because those can take a long time to produce.

CATHY WURZER: Yeah. Say, you mentioned, of course, you get out early. You plant peas and some carrots. What's in the works for your garden right now? Because I know you've got just a wide variety of things and some really cool things that you wouldn't normally think to plant.

MEG COWDEN: Yeah. So one outdoor task that I want to just mention really briefly that people might want to make sure they're thinking about doing if they haven't, if I've got gardeners listening, is any kind of fruit trees or our blueberry shrubs, for instance. We haven't finished doing all of our winter pruning yet. So if you haven't gotten it, I think this weekend is last call for pruning.

But in terms of what's growing inside and my plans for the garden, I'm growing, of course, lots of flowers. And that's actually what's on my brain today because I'm sowing a ton of my annual flowers. But I'm also taking on a whole bunch of new to me things. And this is what I love about the garden is as much as I'm an expert, I can be a novice at the same time when I grow vegetables or herbs I've never grown before.

So I'm growing cumin this year for the seeds. It's a spice that we use more than once a week in our kitchen. So imagine having a jar of my own cumin. That's pretty cool. So I have no idea how it's going to go, but I'm going for it. I've been growing ginger for several years now. And I do just pick up ginger at the-- organic ginger at the co-op, and I sprout it in late January, February. So I've got that going. Peanuts is another crop that I absolutely love growing here.

CATHY WURZER: What?

MEG COWDEN: Bowls-- Yeah. It's an amazing experience to grow peanuts because they're just not like any other food that we're used to maybe harvesting. A tomato, you pull it somewhere up there off the leafy-- it's a fruit. You can see it. Peanuts are just a complete wonderful growing experience. Great for a family with kids. They do take a while. So I start mine indoors in the end of April, and I'll transplant them out sometime in June.

They often also get those little tunnels to give them heat. But there are varieties that are only about 110 days. That might not mean anything, but to me, that's four months. So I got to get them out of the ground by end of September. Really, when you start getting below 50 degrees, the peanuts are done. So you really want to push the season on those. But they're really fun to grow.

And in my research over the years, Cathy, of growing peanuts, there was an extension bulletin from the University of Minnesota from sometime in the '80s I think it was. And they did a study. And they said that Minnesota was a perfectly viable-- it was a perfectly viable agricultural crop for our state. But it just never picked up steam in the agricultural community.

CATHY WURZER: Well, because it feels like something that should be-- and it is-- grown down South. Why up here? But I guess I never thought about that. You mentioned flowers. And I'm so excited to see color out there. What are you-- what are you planting here for your spring cutting garden?

MEG COWDEN: Yeah. I know. The colors are really-- I am ready for something other than white.

CATHY WURZER: Yes. Or gray.

MEG COWDEN: So yeah. Yeah. I've got zinnias are probably my very favorite and my most colorful addition to the garden. I grow a lot of the really big zinnias, so Benary's Giant. I've got this pink nasturtium that I've just fallen in love with the last couple of years. I tend to lean towards purples and pinks and oranges and whites in my garden. I avoid yellow. But just a personal preference. So a lot of the colors-- that's kind of my color scheme.

Cosmos. I love adding cosmos in here and there. It's very frilly. I've got some Gomphrena, which is also known as globe amaranth, which is a lovely dried flower. It makes a beautiful cut flower. But it's an everlasting flower. So it's a really-- and the pollinators love it. It's probably my most unique annual flower that I like to tuck in. It's a beautiful border plant. Strawflower is other everlasting that I like to grow that's really fun.

It's been kind of tricky to germinate for me this year. My germination is quite low. But I have enough. I don't need very many of them to make an impact in the garden. And oh, marigolds, sweet alyssum, calendula, snapdragons. The list goes on. But those are the big ones that I have been sowing over the last couple weeks. And now yesterday and today, I really started going on my flowers. So.

CATHY WURZER: Oh, I can hardly wait to see your photographs. I'm telling you. Say, we got about two and a half minutes left here. It's maple syrup season. But I have never heard of this either. This is why I love you because you're so adventurous. You're taking on a new syruping project? Is that right?

MEG COWDEN: Yeah. So gardeners and black walnuts don't get along because black walnut trees produce a toxin in the soil and the leaves. It's called juglone. And it's allelopathic. So nothing else can really grow well under it. And we happen to live in basically a walnut grove on our property. We cut down one walnut tree to put our garden in. The rest of the walnuts are farther away from where we garden, so they're not an issue.

But we decided, you know what? We're going to embrace the walnut tree last year. A friend of mine who also wrote a gardening book last year, they've got an arboretum on the East Coast. They were tapping their black walnut trees. And they said to me, it's a 40 to 1 ratio. And that means for every 40 gallons of sap that you draw from a tree, when you boil it down, you'll yield one gallon of syrup. That is a lot. It is a lot. That is the same ratio of maple syrup.

But so we've done it two, three weekends now we've boiled our sap down. The couple benefits of black walnut. They leaf out later, so you can tap the trees for longer. And they might even start running a little earlier. But the flavor is different. It doesn't have the same sweetness. It doesn't taste like maple syrup. It tastes like a syrup. It's a little nutty. It's a little minty. But that's been just a really nice way to embrace the prolonged winter that we've been blessed with this year.

CATHY WURZER: Oh, Meg. My gosh. Well, you know what? Thank you for giving us some hope here and talking about your garden. I hope you have a good rest of the day. Thank you so much.

MEG COWDEN: Thanks, Cathy. Take care.

CATHY WURZER: You too. That was master gardener Meg Cowden. She's the author of the book Plant Grow Harvest Repeat and the founder of the gardening advice group Modern Garden Guild. She's fantastic. Thank you for listening to Minnesota Now. We appreciate you. Have a good rest of the day. This is MPR News.