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Many gardeners have been receiving garden catalogs for a couple of months. Those of you who are on the Chisago County Master Gardeners mailing list should receive mailings by mid January, including the 2011 Plant Order Form.

Most of the forms are the same as last year except that we no longer offer lingonberry. Instead we are offering Canada Red rhubarb plants. The rest of the order form is the same with Autumn Britten, Heritage, and Boyne raspberries. Also, Chippewa, Polaris, and North Blue blueberries, and many Washington asparagus plants. Again, we are offering Annapolis, Glooscap, and Sparkle strawberries.

If you ordered onions from us last year you remember the problem we had with them. It gives little comfort to know that any onion orders that came from the south part of the country had problems due to flooded conditions in the onion fields. The only people I spoke with who had good onions were those that planted from seed. We hope for a better year and we will again offer Candy Spanish Yellow and Copra onions. Remember that all of our plants are bare root and hardy for our area.

In the mailing will be information about our Spring Bonanza that will be Saturday, March 12, at the Chisago Lake Lutheran Church in Center City. Information about our Spring Series will be available with an insert about our apple pruning class with Jim Birkholz. This class has always been the most popular in our Spring Series and is held the end of February or the first part of March, because that's the best time of the year to prune fruit trees. Jim and his family own and operate the Pleasant Valley Orchard, south of Shafer, and they also grow pick your own strawberries. The class will be February 22, 2011, at 6:30 p.m. at the Senior Center in North Branch.

Sometime during January the Chisago County Master Gardeners will be moving to the Ag Service Building that also houses Soil and Water. The address is 38814 3rd Avenue, in North Branch 55056. This building will be easy to find because it's on Highway 95, "Main Street" North Branch. We still don't have the phone number, but it will be in a future article as soon as we know.

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