The new year has begun with new opportunities, new hopes, new ideas, and new projects for our gardens.  The vegetable garden we planned during the pandemic is very tiny. Very very tiny. I planted beans, peas, lettuce, radishes, zucchini, beets and chard. Too many varieties. This was a mistake. I have to rethink the best way to get a usable harvest in a tiny garden. The beans and the peas worked well, but I did learn that putting…

New Year's Resolutions have been around for a long time. Four thousand years ago the Babylonians made this day a time to pay off all debts. The ancient Romans celebrated their god Janus, who looked both back and forward, the past and the future. He was charge of doors and the transitions between the stages of life and the shifts of eras. When I was young I tried to make new year's resolutions, but I had children, and…

We rejoiced when the weather man promised us a white Christmas. We had at least 16 fluffy beautiful inches of snow. We thrilled to the winter beauty. But wait! On Christmas morning we woke to torrential rains. The windows are frozen shut. I couldn't get my window open. It was still raining in the morning of Boxing Day. Never have my planting beds been so deluged. Guess what?  More rain is predicted!  I'm counting on a prediction error.…

A City Christmas was written 43 years ago when my husband, 5 children and and I were living in  the ancestral apartment in Manhattan. A CITY CHRISTMAS It was Christmas Eve in the City. Shoppers filled Herald Square and hurried along Fifth Avenue as it grew late.  The streets emptied. Shop windows glowed like rich jewels and the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree sparkled in silent and solitary splendor. At home parents wrapped the last of the Christmas presents…

Even Charles Dickens, who wrote many books , 20 to be precise, can have periods  when he cannot think of a plot and when his recent books are not getting the attention he got after writing The Pickwick Papers in serial form. Nowadays Dicken's book A Christmas Carol is everywhere, as it was after its immediate publication shortly before Christmas in 1843. But it was rough,  going.  The Man Who Invented Christmas, "based on the inspiring true story."…

A white Christmas is a sure thing. When we woke up on December  18, one week before Christmas, we received 16 inches of  lovely snow - not too heavy. It took a good part of the day to clear streets and sidewalks. I think we were all glad to return to  our houses where we could sit near our brilliant Christmas trees and enjoy a hot toddy - or a cup of hot cocoa. We watched the old…

The Annual Garden Calendar means you don't need to have been a University of Massachusetts student to benefit on their studies which is shared generously with all of us. This is just the beginning of information about vegetables and flowers - and weeds. The gardening year is very long - happily for us who love working in the garden - and strolling through our garden to admire our  work, and  the work of Mother Nature. The Garden Calendar…

Apparently many gardeners are finding the need to leave their beautiful old gardens and move on to new gardens, and finding books to find a new way. I can speak to this urge myself, having left my gardens in Heath, to create a compact stroll garden filled with trees, shrubs, flowers and a place to sit in Greenfield. I also needed a garden that would not need so much work. Windcliff: A  story of people, plants and gardens…

The Feast of Saint Nicholas is the beginning of our Christmas. December 6, 2007 is also the beginning of my commonweeder blog which I celebrate with great pleasure. Every year on this date I have thought about the many  wonderful gardeners and others who have shared their skills and talents with me.  I have learned and laughed and given thanks for my good fortune. This year as I celebrate my 80th birthday all these happy days of the…

Photos of my garden from the view from my office window is one way I keep track of weather and changes in the garden over all the seasons. After the drought this summer I did not expect three days of rain, sometimes very hard raid. Our garden sits on clay and a high water table. There are many floods but to have such a drenching at this time of the year is very unusual.  You can see we…