In youth, you look for mentors to get you going down a path. Later on, you look to them for a glimpse of where the path eventually leads. As a beginning gardener, I exploded with questions about seeds, soil chemistry or how to predict frost. In midlife, I looked at old gardeners and wondered …
After an April marked by snowy mornings and chill winds, spring planting requires an extra shot of courage. Even if you’ve hardened off cold-sensitive transplants such as tomatoes and cucumbers, setting flats outside on sunny days, it will be an act of faith to finally put them in the ground. Will the weather “have …
A drizzle of cream. A dab of butter. A slice of cheese. What could possibly be wrong with pleasures like those? And yet, to the fat-fearful, they might as well be arsenic — especially heavy cream, which seems to occupy its own circle of dietary damnation. Granted there are some folks whose systems don’t react …
There is a wise motto used by civil engineers: “Roads first.” Whatever the work is, you can’t begin it until you get there. It is no different for a garden. A path takes you into it and allows you to work there productively and happily. The layout of paths and beds defines a gardener’s style. …
This is a great time to be a gardener. Each year the choice of what you can plant seems larger and more eclectic. And for the home grower, especially, much of what’s new is what’s old. Many catalogs include heirloom vegetables, many of them from places far distant, throughout the world. By not sticking to …
The herb garden needs a makeover. Some of the sage plants are so old and woody they look like a failed experiment with bonsai. Ornamental flowers of all sorts have stolen in. This year I want fresh new herbs and lots of them, so I can dry them, make herb vinegars, and have a plot …
It’s easy to get someone to eat a tomato, but I’ve always found kale a tough sell — until I discovered the Tuscan kind. Even diehard kale-haters, once they try it, make it a regular part of their diet, and not just for its payload of vitamin C, folic acid, calcium and iron. It’s the …
There is a common perception that flower gardens are planted for looks, vegetable gardens for utility. But in fact, vegetable gardens are the place where beauty and bounty meet, and flower gardens have a higher calling to promote botanical diversity and sustain pollinators. The American home vegetable garden was once a farm in miniature, a …
Fuzzy kiwi fruits burst on the American scene in the trend-hungry 1980s, but smooth-skinned hardy kiwis were there all along, hiding for much of the century beneath the leaves of Actinidia, an ornamental vine. Those became a hot item at about the same time, not as a commercial fruit crop but as a feature in …
Open any gardening book and it will tell you that crop rotation is a beneficial practice. The principle is a simple one. You don’t plant anything in the same place where it grew last year, and preferably not the year before that, or the year before that. Rotating results in healthier, better-yielding crops, partly because …
I’ve never understood strawberry rhubarb pie. It’s considered a classic recipe, but most true classics follow the old gardening calendar, using fruits and vegetables in season. They go back before the days of freezers and diesel trucks. Strawberries and rhubarb taste fine together but in the garden, they are not precisely bedfellows. Rhubarb’s main claim …
Kitchen Garden Thank heaven there are still some gardeners who grow root vegetables. Not just spring radishes, baby carrots and petite leeks, but rows of big, bulbous beets and hefty rutabagas. These folks raise bushels of potatoes, wheelbarrow loads of cabbages, sacks of onions. With muddy fingers, they dig for buried treasure as cold weather …
