It’s a cook’s nightmare. The table is set, hungry diners hover, and the beans still aren’t done. They’ve been cooking for six hours, but still haven’t softened and never will. For those of us who have foresworn canned beans in favor of the real thing, the unpredictability of dried beans’ cooking time can turn a …
Summer may be the sweet season, as strawberries, melons and peaches appear in a delicious progression of ripeness. But the sweet tastes of winter are treasured too. After the first frosts, something magical happens to the vegetables that remain in the garden. It’s quite different from the sugar buildup in summer fruits, designed to entice …
How do we learn to garden? Those of us who write about the subject do our best to give useful information, just as favorite authors have done for us. We hope our pages end up dog-eared and mud-smeared, sharing shelf space not with Dickens and Proust but with pruners, and twine. Even then, we help …
Vegetable fashions may come and go, but Jerusalem artichokes have been grown on this continent for a very long time. Native American gardeners were tending this nutritious crop well before it caught the eye of Sir Walter Raleigh, who brought it back to England, and the explorer Samuel de Champlain, who introduced it to France. …
Life is not like the movies, especially when it comes to gardening. Looking after plants isn’t considered the stuff of high drama, suspense or action adventure, so the garden, in film, tends to be a setting, a symbol or an idea. The 1993 version of “The Secret Garden,” for instance, might teach you a bit …
Of all the jobs in the gardening year, digging potatoes is one of my favorite. It’s like an Easter egg hunt, except that it happens in summer and fall instead of spring. As soon as I spot blossoms on the plants, I know I can steal a few tubers from the edge of the row, …
Summer days are lawn days, with the hum of mowers in the neighborhood, the scent of grass newly cut, the sight of grounds cloaked in emerald velvet (or blotchy burlap if the owners are lax and the weather dry). For the environmentally minded, these are also days of lawn guilt. Even if we practice sustainable …
I’ve never had any trouble believing that spinach made Popeye strong. Imagine what powers he might have had if it he’d eaten garden spinach instead of canned. A well grown spinach patch is beautiful: rows of lush, dark green leaves waiting to be picked and tossed in a hearty salad, or sautéed just long enough …
Summer is by no means over and plans are already underway for next year’s garden. I’m not the one making them, though. It will be many months before the new seed catalogs arrive, and what with weeding and watering I haven’t had a chance to come up with a scheme for next year. The garden …
Say what you will about beastly, dry, hot weather, it has one virtue. The weeds don’t like it either. Their glorious season is spring, when the moist earth favors their agenda. In summer it’s not hard to dispatch them while they’re small by skimming just below the soil surface with a sharp hoe. Do this …
