Joys of Minnesota

  When I landed in Minnesota and lived on borrowed chunks of time, I would compare stuff with India, as that was my only point of reference. With time, the novelty wore off, but these things still stuck in mind.

Library system - now this is across USA, but I will comment as a MN user.
Its unbelievable how many things are free ! Books. Magazine even. DVDs of movies & TV shows, and learning stuff too. Children's books. Do you know how expensive all of these are to buy ? And then to store books & dispose later. Big Thanks to Libraries.
Online system makes life easier. Search & order books. Stop-by the library for only a few minutes to pick it up. Return books via a slot in drive-through window. Renewal in the online-account. Late fees are just a few cents generally.

Trails - nearly every city has one. Or atleast the sidewalk system is far & wide & clean to go run.

Lakes - water & ponds everywhere. Not called "Land of 100 thousand Lakes" for nothing.

Strawberry - I am always in awe of the Strawberries. Each one being juicy, chunky and large size. 

Caribou Coffee - Now that is coffee. Its really good.
Plus this is the store I approached when I got lost driving through highways without GPS & cellphone. They let me use their landline. Those were olden days, I was new in USA and only a person in my situation can appreciate their help.

Clear Blue sky, lush greenery which pops out every spring. Winter has its share of evergreens to look at.

Winter wonderland after every snowstrom, snow shower, snow blizzard. When bare trees, fence frames and random still objects are like coated in snow. Its called hoar-frost. 

In Feb, Mar & April, there is so much snow, there is no place to shovel it. Its spilling on sidewalks & roads. We run out of place to push it in. The 2-car driveway narrows down to cycle-width.

There are a whole lot of memes that perfectly capture the living in MN experience. Especially the winter MinneSnowta. That's what the real thing is.

    

Summer Vegetable Gardening in Zone 4B Minnesota

Minnesota is in Zone 4B. We have had a summer vegetable garden between May and Sep. Every year the layout has been different.

Nature has been reclaiming its space. Deers have been roaming confidently around all neighborhoods. And chomping on everyone's freshly grown veggie gardens in the Summer. One such did that to my bean plants & made our neighbors newly planted apple tree, bare of all leaves. Bunnies have been equally bold and out in open.

My beans plants were leafless and shivering literally. Finally I gave up and bought chicken-coop fence & fence posts. It was a 15 minutes job, laying it around the entire plot. I wondered why I hadn't done this sooner ! 

 

And it was equally easy rolling it back to packup when the cold wave hit in Oct and I had cleared all frost-bitten plants.

Methi was the only one with reliable results & most ROI. Germinating the seeds was the key we figured out this year. Soak the methi seads in water for a day. Drain water & keep it wrapped in tissue in a quiet place for few days & they spourt. Then transfer to soil and water as usual. They will burst out. Disappointing part was that the sticks were very hard-fibrous, compared to market methi.

Here is the Mango cycle from seed to 1 year old sapling. I germinated some of the seeds from store-bought mangoes. Loads of Youtube videos guiding how to break it out of hard-shell. Be sure to have a glove in the other hand, while using knife to pry open the shell.

Watching one of the tropical plants grow tempted me with Jackfruit.

 

Overall harvest of beans was disappointing, but also got other harvest were fun.