For three days I haven't been fun to live with. Preserving the harvest, fulfilling my writing deadlines, managing my family’s outrageous expectations of motherhood, and doing all of this without losing my ever-living mind. Even the dogs are keeping their distance. Oh, and there’s something else…What was it?….Ah yes. The garden. I actually have to [...]
Thankful as most of us are for the drenching rain this weekend and thunderstorms this week, it remains a hot summer with wasps and Johnson grass around every corner. Spring gardeners are leaving their hard-core cousins outdoors as they beat a hasty retreat to air conditioned sunrooms, prosecco glasses in hand. Any further gardening will [...]
This week, five tips for beginner gardeners just starting to plan their spring gardens. Tip #1. Keep it small Whatever else I try to do in this column, my overriding goal is to encourage more life-long gardeners, and nothing makes a person feel more inadequate and exhausted than biting off more than they can [...]
Taking a friend home the other day, we briefly stopped at my house first. From the windows of the car I stared at the new growth popping up in the Yellow Garden that leads to the front door. Bright chartreuse infused all with a light haze of spring color, though many taller structural elements still [...]
Well, it certainly feels as if we’ve thwarted the groundhog. Yet I have thought this many times during my life on the East Coast and ended up with two inch green stubs to harvest for an evening’s Caesar salad. Winter will bite back before it is all done, and neither we nor our plants will [...]
Human beings have sought control of their outside environments for millennia – and not without a great deal of effort. When Harry Hunter-Gatherer decided to alter the course of human civilization and grow a few hundred square feet of einkorn, it should be noted that the Extension Service was not just a phone call away [...]
Disappointment. 8 feet of peas = 4 peas. It was, in many ways, inevitable. If you build it, they will come, if you plant it, they will eat. Friends have bemoaned the loss of salad beds and snap pea trellises to unnamed creatures and I have cried with them (insofar as I am [...]
A nursery grower friend texted me last week over an ethical dilemma. Should she sell her precious, seed-raised specialty tomatoes (and assorted tender darlings) to customers that promised faithfully not to plant them for at least another five weeks? “They want them.” she agonized. “They say they are going to care for them…but five weeks?” [...]
