Downloads

This book is a website, which is the wrong format for a few of the things in it. A site assessment happens standing in a yard with a shovel. A maintenance calendar is most useful stuck to a shed wall. A bloom chart wants to be held up next to an actual garden bed in April.

So those parts are also here as a printable booklet.

Print it double-sided

It is laid out for two-sided printing on letter paper. Staple the corner and it lives in a back pocket. Let's grow together!

Field Companion

Minnesota Native Plants — Field Companion PDF · 11 pages · letter · 1.6 MB

A site-assessment checklist with room to write, a month-by-month maintenance calendar, the three bloom-succession charts, and two ruled pages for notes.

What's in it:

Pages	Section	What it does
2–3	Site assessment	Sun hours, the percolation test, the jar test, the two free lookups (Web Soil Survey and the Marschner map), the local-rules checklist, and a gridded box to sketch the bed
4–5	Maintenance calendar	What to do each month, and — for December — permission to do nothing
6–8	Bloom succession	Prairie, woodland and wetland species by month, so you can see your own gaps
9–10	Notes	Ruled pages: what is blooming today, what to look up later

Bloom Charts

The three bloom charts are also in the chapters themselves, where they are inline SVG and scale to any screen:

• Prairie bloom succession — 37 native species
• Woodland bloom succession — 45 native species
• Wetland and shoreline bloom succession — 26 native species

Non-native and invasive species are left out of all three. A succession chart reads as a list of things to plant, and Smooth Brome and Kentucky Bluegrass both flower in the prairie window.

How the Bloom Data Was Built

Bloom months come from .plant-gallery/traits.json, the same hand-authored Minnesota trait data behind the Plant Gallery Quick Facts tables. Bars show the typical window in the Twin Cities — expect a week or two later in the north, a little earlier in the far southeast.

They are planning figures, not a phenology dataset. A cold May moves everything.

Licence

Everything here is CC BY-NC-SA 4.0, the same as the rest of the book. Print it, copy it, hand it out at a garden club, adapt it for a class — all fine, with attribution and non-commercially.

Regenerating These Files

python3 scripts/bloom-charts.py       # inline SVG charts into chapters 3, 4, 5
python3 scripts/bloom-charts-png.py   # same charts, rendered for print
python3 scripts/field-companion.py    # build the booklet PDF

The booklet is built with the booklet-pdf skill's page helpers. The charts have one source — the chapter markdown — so the printed and on-screen versions cannot drift apart.