The raspberries are warm from the golden late afternoon sun as I pluck each one and drop it into the quart yogurt container hanging from my neck by a length of garden twine. As I pick, my eye is drawn to those with the deep color of ripeness, but my fingers make the final test. …
Nobody ever told me that farming was a glamorous way of life, and it’s just as well. At my first farm job, I supervised a field of rotting tomatoes. We were growing them for the preservation of their seeds, to be sold to Johnny’s Selected. Each day I would gather the squishy fruits with the …
Fresh annual herbs and summer dishes go together — dill with cucumbers and yogurt, cilantro in salsas, chervil in creamy soups. But it’s hard to keep them productive. In hot weather they quickly go to flower, leaving barely enough foliage to garnish a deviled egg. That’s why basil is such a wonder. It flowers too, …
It’s often said that a green thumb is a dirty thumb. The best way to learn to garden is simply to start doing it, with a sharp eye out for the way plants grow successfully in the wild. Certain rules apply, and whether these are unchanging natural laws, and part of a grand plan, nobody …
It didn’t make the front page, but sometime toward the end of the second millennium, basil replaced parsley as America’s most popular herb. Much of the thanks goes to pesto, the gloriously green Italian pasta sauce that set the nation’s food processors humming back in the ’80s and is now as much a household word …
The “hungry gap”, between the end of storage crops and the summer food avalanche, is well behind us. The problem now is what to do with all those vegetables. Sometimes this is easy: storing spring beets in the fridge, cooking down extra spinach into a creamy purée, freezing the peas and beans. But lettuce is …
Gardeners are good at nurturing, but it is a quality that some must work to restrain. For a friend of mine, this is especially true of thinning, not because it’s tedious (though by the end of a long carrot row it is) but because she hates to kill any seedling she has sown. Crowded, struggling, …
Big, bland and boring. That’s the typical modern strawberry. Firm-fleshed for easy shipping, it offers little excitement. No wonder people dip it in chocolate. Compare it to a home-grown berry and it will be disappointing. Sample a tiny wild strawberry, smaller than a pea, or the slightly larger alpine strawberry which gardeners can grow from …
Ron is frantic. His urban cat has a perfectly good litter box but prefers to use the pots and planters on the sunny windowsill where Ron is trying to grow herbs. It’s only natural that his pet should prefer natural earth to the bagged imitation. Cats’ natural instinct is to bury their droppings in soil …
Forget what you’ve heard: There is no official time of year to plant a garden. Around the date of the last hypothetical frost, people might ask you, “Got your garden in?” If you’ve been feasting on greens from a cold frame all winter, and pulling up sweet carrots, leeks and parsnips, your garden was never …
Can taste buds have spring fever? Most gardeners have caught what Emily Dickinson called “A Little Madness in the Spring.” They’re salivating over catalog descriptions of juicy tomatoes and melons as their windowsills overflow with seedlings. In the old days, this period was called the “hungry gap.” Produce in the root cellar had seen better …
“I ignore what the books say,” my friend huffed. “If I planted my vegetables as far apart as I’m supposed to, they’d be in my neighbor’s yard.” I know what she means. In today’s small gardens the old guidelines don’t apply. If we had to grow cabbage in rows 3 feet apart, few of us …
