When I was about halfway through my Henhouse Series, a friend said I had to visit Cosima. Her henhouse was a Taj Mahal of henhouses she said. Look here and you can see the center posts that is key in holding up the green roof. When I finally visited Cosima I had to agree. Her henhouse is a work of art. She said they built this cordwood masonry henhouse using Robert L. Roy's books and that this is actually…
I live in a ruraltown of 750 souls in the western corner of Massachusetts that sits on the Vermont border. On the Fourth of July in 1981 I happened to meet two other friends at the spinning wheel in the town museum. We were celebrating the holiday, but got to complaining that we never went out to dinner, we couldn't afford to, and besides there were no good restaurants closer than 40 miles. Actually there were no restaurants…
In spite of the warm fall, with only one real frost, the garden is beginning to die. Its demise seems to have been hurried by the three days of rain we just had. All these photos were taken in the rain. This is the very last daylily of summer. Ann Varner is a real trooper. Behind her you can see there are a few Buttercream nasturtiums crawling around, and it has been so warm that even the canna…
CISA (Community Involved in Sustaining Agriculture) has established a revolving loan fund designed to help farmers recover from Hurricane Irene. The Fund will offer quick, zero-interest loans to assist farmers and farm businesses in the aftermath of the storm and flooding. They didn't do it alone; Whole Foods, Equity Trust and an anonymous donor who gave a $50,000 challenge are all a part of this effort to help the farmers who are so important to all of us. You…
All of a sudden I noticed the moss growing between the pavers on the Piazza in front of our house.
Holz hausen, a German system of building a fast drying wood pile. Click here to see an artful woodpile in Hawley. Click here to see more Wordlessness on Wednesday. OK. Almost wordless.
There was nothing photogenic about our chores this glorious autumn weekend - mowing, weeding, cutting back - so I'll concentrate on an exploration of another Heath henhouse. Joey built, overbuilt he said, this 10x12 foot henhouse for his ten hens. You can see he has a lot of help! He read a lot and looked at a lot of henhouses, and talked to a lot of people before he built his. The forethought shows. His luck shows too.…
The gardening year really has two planting seasons, spring and fall. Spring planting season is all a-rush with excitement because you can finally get your hands in the dirt, carefully chosen plants are arriving and a casual browse through the local nurseries has sent you home with a truckload of new plants and plans. And then there is the bliss of working beneath an ever warmer and brighter sun. Fall planting season tends to be less exuberant, with…
Nurseries and roadside stands are filled with tidy pots of tidy chrysanthemums, but I planted a collection of these fall bloomers in my Circle Garden this spring. The chrysanthemum family is so various in form, as well as color, that I wanted to branch out a little. My collection of six from Bluestone Perennials got whittled down to three because of rabbits! Fortunately, a reader suggested black netting which discouraged the bunnies, but ineptly placed as it was,…
Yesterday, in the rain, I visted the gardens of Melanie and Ray Poudrier and paid special attention to their collection of heaths and heathers. These two evergreen shrubby plants are often mentioned together in the same breath, but I never really knew how to tell them apart until Melanie made me look at the foliage closely. Heaths and heathers are both members of the Ericaceae family, but heath of the genus Erica has needle-like foliage. The foliage of…