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 …
King Arthur would have known just what to do. My heftiest chef knife was plunged to the hilt in a blue Hubbard squash twice the size of a Thanksgiving turkey and only a heroic effort would remove it. I found that by drawing the handle toward me as far as it would go, then thrusting …
Of all our national holidays, Thanksgiving holds a special place. It’s apolitical and nondenominational. It brings families together. It conjures up a brief moment when we were not trying to dominate or extirpate the people who arrived before us on this continent. And it’s all about food. We know very little about that “First Thanksgiving” …
This year November arrived, and the tomatoes refused to depart. Even after a few mild nips of frost, some of the vines soldiered on in protected locations. In a greenhouse, the vines would have remained vigorous long after it was time to pull them down and make way for winter spinach. Why is this so …
I love the first frost. I’ve never joined the chorus of gardeners who view it as a disaster to be lamented. Sure, half the garden has been obliterated. High time! By then I’m tired of picking beans, finding homes for the extra squash, and feeling I need to can every last tomato. Besides, frost is …
It’s often said that making compost is like cooking. You assemble your ingredients — in this case, a combination of dry, high-carbon organic materials such as dead bean vines and straw, mixed with moist, high-nitrogen ones such as kitchen scraps and manure. Then you use heat to break the ingredients down. With cooking you use …
There’s a red-stemmed collard in my garden right now that is taller than I am — impressive for a member of the brassica family. It’s a magnificent creature, with huge blue-green leaves that get smaller as they ascend the magenta stalks. The top is crowned with abundant sprays of pale yellow blossoms, presently enjoyed by …
