Gardeners and cooks make excellent bedfellows. Likewise, farmers and chefs, judging from the number of restaurant menus that honor the producers of their vegetables, meats and cheeses. An affectation? A fad? I think not. It reflects a passionate interest in how food comes into being. Farmers, in turn, love to see what chefs do with …
If I had the self-discipline of a Zen Master, I could walk out to the garden on a late summer day, pick the most perfect tomato for lunch, then make compost out of all the others too numerous to consume. At heart, I believe in living from moment to moment in the garden, eating only, …
When you pick a fruit or vegetable, it is still a living, breathing thing. It respires, taking oxygen from the air and releasing carbon dioxide. But it can’t live indefinitely. A peach, lettuce or bean, once cut, can no longer make food by means of photosynthesis, and begins to draw down its stored reserves. It …
If compost is the Holy Grail of organic gardening, what’s the holier than thou? Sifted compost. What you want in making perfect mature compost is, of course, organic matter so fully broken down that the original ingredients — whether straw, weeds, kitchen scraps or goat droppings — are no longer recognizable. Finished compost looks like …
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 …
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 …
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