By Gorkaazk, via Wikimedia Commons
Happy first day of winter. Since chilly rain and mud are not most people's idea of a good time, we've pulled together a list of helpful gardening resources for you to read and bookmark now, then click back to, and take advantage of, when it's actually nice enough to go back outdoors.
The University of Missouri Extension (or, if you live easterly, the Illinois Extension Office), offers all kinds of fantastic horticultural info, often in the form of handy-dandy, downloadable PDFs. In realtime, they do soil testing and have folks you can call up and ask about plants, pests, soil quality...pretty much anything related to gardening. You can also call the master gardeners on the help line for the Kemper Center for Home Gardening, but you might be able to find your answer on this help page, too. The Garden's classes page, and its events page (where it lists plant sales), are worth bookmarking, too.
Though Garden Clubs sound so 1950s pill-box-hat-and-white-gloves, they're actually a great way to get advice, hang out with, and swap divided perennials with other gardeners. Here's a comprehensive list from the Federated Garden Clubs of Missouri.
I've raved about Gateway Greening before on DtD. If you forgot to bookmark it then, you can do that now.
If you grow herbs, the Webster Groves Herb Society and St. Louis Herb Society websites are non-negotiable. In 2013, I won't be able to group these sites together, but the rose is the 2012 herb of the year, so I'll throw in The Rose Society of Greater St. Louis in this section...
Even if you don't qualify as one yet, there's a lot of good stuff on the St. Louis Master Gardeners page, including a great list of resources.
Native plant lovers probably already have this one saved, but if not: here's the Missouri Plants of Merit page.
The Gateway Gardener maintains a ginormous list of links to local, independent nurseries, huzzah. You'll also find arborists and more Garden Clubs at that link.
The Old Farmer's Almanac is, yes, old. But they're new and digital, too! In fact, they have a great site. And a great and useful Twitter feed.
If you get most of your seeds via mail order, you will definitely want to bookmark Cyndi's Catalog of Garden Catalogs.
One of my favorite online resources is Steve Solomon's Soil and Health library. It's old-school, it's simple, but it's got very useful information you will not find anywhere else. The Soil and Health Yahoo! Group is also worth your time, especially if you grow vegetables.
Dave's Garden has all kinds of nifty stuff, from biographies of the great seedsmen (Atlee Burpee, anyone?) to a huge, inclusive plant database. They also have a library of videos and a really active forum where you can talk to other gardeners.
As far as blogs go...yeah, it's subjective, but it's hard not to find Garden Rant compelling. Mr. Brown Thumb actually wrote a screed against Garden Rant (it's amazing how much drama the garden blog can generate, truly!) and while I didn't agree with his arguments, I appreciate his blog as well. I'm also a huge fan of Root Simple, Edible Geography, and Urbanilism. Those last two focus more on food and foraging. Since we're heading down the primrose path (ha) of poetic versus practical, I'll add the Missouri Botanical Garden's rare book database (where you can look at hi-res scans of old botanical tomes), and the scans of Emily Dickinson's herbarium on the Harvard's site.
And to tie this up, I'm going to veer back to the super traditional: Better Homes & Gardens has a pretty amazing gardening tab on its site, with a plants encyclopedia, garden layouts and resources by region. Martha Stewart Living's gardening section is a little less encyclopedic, but it's chock full of good ideas and beautiful pictures, just like in the magazine.
This isn't a comprehensive list, but hopefully it's helpful. Feel free to suggest sites in the comments below if you feel like I've made a terrible, glaring omission.
