I got my first 2011 catalog today! Totally Tomatoes offers 34 (count 'em) pages of tomato varieties - and then we begin on the peppers. Sixteen pages of peppers, from sweet to hot, big and small, round and curly, then on to a couple of pages of cukes and other veggies, plus an array of tomato growing and preserving equipment. Cook books, too. Have your gotten your first catalog yet?
I don’t know about you, but I am already starting to work on my holiday gift list. Those who know me, know I think that few gifts are as good as a good book. Books teach and inspire, and often offer great encouragement. Gardening has long been one of the nation’s most popular pastimes, but recently with our difficult economy, and worries about the energy costs of agribusiness, many people are turning to the vegetable garden, for fresh…
As I was baking cranberry bread yesterday, I remembered an interview I did with Wil Kiendzior and his wife Louisa Sapienza about their cranberry beds. Cranberries are another perennial crop that can be added to your edible garden. Wil Kiendzior started gardening when two things converged in his life. His two daughters were born and he started teaching high school courses on ecology and the environment, using Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring as a text. His first gardens grew…
The November/December issue of The American Gardener: The Magazine of the American Horticultural Society arrived the other day. As I was browsing through it last night I was surprised, but thrilled, to see Ellen Sousa, who lives in Central Massachusetts, quoted in Kris Wetherbee's article Garden Cleanup Reconsidered. Ellen's own landscape is not only a Certified Wildlife Habitat, it is a Monarch Waystation so it was no surprise to hear her say, "instead of doing the traditional fall…
It's time to renew memberships! What are you a member of? My most local membership is in the New England Wildflower Society because their propagation operation and nursery are so close by. An individual membership is only $50, for which you get free admission to the famous Garden in the Woods in Framingham, discounts on workshops and lectures, discounts at Nasami Farm and in the Gift Shop. NEWFS also participates in a Reciprocal Admissions Program that will give you free…
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Some say that almanacs have been around for thousands of years, but perhaps the oldest American almanac most people are familiar with is Poor Richard's Almanac published by Benjamin Franklin long before he fiddled with kites and string or became our Ambassador to France. Baer's Almanac is new to me, but the editor's give a bow to Franklin with a few of the aphorisms that helped to make him popular. How about "A slip of the foot, you…
This Abutilon or parlor maple, or flowering maple, whichever you prefer, has probably appeared on Bloom Day more often than any other plant. It is almost always in bloom. I put it outdoors on the shady piazza for the summer, but it spends most of the year in my upstairs bedroom by a west window, but the room is bright with two big south windows. The temperature may occasionally get close to 70 degrees on a winter day,…
Elise Schlaikjer has named all the houses she has lived in Phoenix House, but when she moved to Greenfield, just two years ago, the name was especially apt. It took a fall and a head injury, but Schlaikjer decided that after 23 years in Michigan it was time to move nearer her daughter Laura, in Greenfield. At the age of 73 she was ready to start a new life, like the Phoenix rising from the ashes, reborn and…
The Walking exhibit at the Art Garden in Shelburne Falls has closed but I am carrying the image of this joyful road by Pamela Snow and Ursula Snow with me as I start on the road to the holidays, beginning today when I set up the Silent Auction for Holiday Village at the Charlemont Federated Church. The Silent Auction will have everything up for bid from bags of Donovan's potatoes, blown glass, gorgeous jewels, and passes for the Zoar Outdoor…