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 …
Every now and then an obscure plant creeps quietly into my life, and makes a home for itself in my garden. After a while I wonder what I ever did without it. Anise hyssop was just such a revelation. About 25 years ago, a nurserywoman in Gaylordsville, Conn., named Kathleen Nelson, who had introduced me …
In the official language of botany, a plant is “armed” if it packs certain defensive gear. A cactus uses sharp spines — which are modified leaves — to protect itself from creatures seeking the water inside its stems. A lemon tree guards its fruit with thorns, which are modified branches. Bramble fruits such as raspberries …
If you could see through the fog this week you may have noticed some emerald treasures: edible shoots, nudging their way up through winter’s leaf litter. Fiddleheads, garlic mustard, milkweed and dandelions are just some of the wild treats that appear in the early spring. Fiddleheads are the furled frond of a young fern and …
I’ve never had much appetite for blue food. Apart from the sky, blue is rare in nature, and even more so on the plate. A delphinium blossom or a huge, iridescent Morpho butterfly are both miracles of blueness. But I pass up those Peruvian blue potatoes in favor of golden ones, and the same goes …
ELLSWORTH — The Ellsworth Garden Club’s annual Pink Tulip Festival and Plant Sale will be held on Saturday, May 19, from 9 a.m.-2 p.m. at Donald Little Park on State Street. Proceeds will help to support breast cancer awareness as well as the Endowment Fund for the park, which the club has owned and maintained …
If every plant is here for a purpose, then few have as full an agenda as the dandelion. For starters, few plants announce spring with as much fanfare. Those joyous little yellow dots are everywhere you look, thanks to the plant’s talent at procreation. It needs no pollinating insect to set its fuzzy balls of …
An old friend of mine was recalling the first time he ate a nasturtium garnish. “It didn’t taste bad, but I felt a little weird about putting it in my mouth. It was so big, and orange, and soft. Not like food. As if I were eating the napkin.” I asked him if he felt …
ELLSWORTH — Do you crave a house full of fragrant, colorful flowers and a kitchen counter laden with freshly picked tomatoes, herbs and greens? Start planting seeds now. But first, read this article. “Seed starting is actually the easiest part of the growing process to control,” said Mary Blackstone, who has had her hands in …
When the grass starts to grow, it’s time to plant potatoes, or so the old saying goes. But how many gardeners are rushing out to plant a vegetable so humble, homely, lumpy and brown? Historically, the potato is an important survival food that has seen humankind through times of war and famine. But nothing to …
The famous homesteader Helen Nearing once told me that gardening was her tennis, her golf and her calisthenics. “I bend, stretch, leap and drop every day,” she explained. Helen had built a stone house in her 70s and was still growing her own food in her 90s. Her husband, Scott Nearing, who died at 100, …
