Merry Gardens Farm

08/29/2026

MARKET DAY in Bemidji! And we are LOADED! Cantelope are peak, cauliflower and broccoli are loving the cooler weather, the last crop of green beans have come in with a force, and carrots are plentiful. 9-1 Union Square.

08/21/2026

This is Rosa glauca. They are the most beautiful shrub on my farm. I can't even tell you how much I love them: leaves the color of nothing you've seen, flowers of an exotic appeal. They will be available at the farmer's market in Bemidji tomorrow. I dug seedlings this spring, took care of them throughout the summer. Can't wait to share with everyone.

08/21/2026

BULK Vegetables 🥔🥕 coming to the farmer's market in Bemidji tomorrow!

POTATOES * ONIONS * CABBAGE * APPLES * CARROTS * PICKLING CUCS

08/15/2026

Onions are coming out of the field and the onion wall is filling up! Lots coming to the market tomorrow, plus our usual van load of just-picked veggies 🥕🥔🥒🍅

08/10/2026

Found by NMJC kids while on the farm picking chokecherries last week!

Amazing find, girls! 😍🙏💕🐛

08/08/2026

07/31/2026

Big load of veggies coming into Bemidji tomorrow morning! 🥕🥒🍅🫑🥔

Plus, BULK GREEN BEANS and PICKLING CUCUMBERS if you missed them last week or are ready to do more!

07/25/2026

😍 This is so cool! An app to help homeowners know which native plants to buy to support bees, hummingbirds, and other pollinators in their area!! 🐝

That hummingbird is not reading the app. But whoever planted them is.
For years, Texas gardeners faced a paradox. They wanted to help pollinators. They went to the garden center, bought the prettiest flowers, and planted them with good intentions. The problem? Most of those plants were cultivars bred for color, not ecology — double-petaled coneflowers that bees cannot access, non-native lantana that offers no larval food, sterile hybrids that look good on Instagram and do nothing for the food web. The well-meaning homeowner became an accidental ecological dead end.
Then Texas launched Wild Thumb.
It is a free native-plant app that does something deceptively simple: it tells Texans exactly which grasses and wildflowers support the pollinators in their specific zip code. Not generic advice. Not pretty pictures. Real data. The app cross-references ecoregion, soil type, rainfall, and bloom period to generate a custom plant list for each user. Want monarchs? Here is the milkweed species that actually grows in your county. Want bumblebees? Here is the beardtongue that blooms when queens are founding nests in April. The mechanism is hyper-local matching — plant A meets pollinator B at the exact moment pollinator B needs it.
Here is why it works. The biggest barrier to native planting is not cost or space. It is decision fatigue. Walk into a nursery and you face 300 varieties, most of them useless to wildlife. Wild Thumb removes the guesswork. It turns ecological restoration into a two-minute decision. The app also tracks what users plant, building a crowdsourced map of habitat across the state. Texas Parks and Wildlife uses that data to identify gaps — corridors that need connecting, species that need more hosts.
The second-order effect is democratization. Native planting used to require a botany degree and a nursery connection. Now it requires a smartphone and a thumb. Suburban lawns, apartment balconies, church courtyards, school playgrounds — every patch of dirt becomes potential habitat. The app does not just tell people what to plant. It tells them they have permission to try.
Thumb wild. Gardens guided. Pollinators thriving.

07/25/2026

PICKLING CUCUMBERS! 🥒🥒 LOTS OF THEM! 🥒🥒

Thanks to the hard work of the amazing neighbor kids Alara and Moe, we are bringing ALOT to the farmer's market in Bemidji tomorrow. We have dill and garlic as well, so get those jars lined up🫙🤗!