Not all garden books are how-to-garden books. Some books for fun are filled with weird and wonderful facts, and others are full of beauty and history. One book sent to me by Storey Publishing last month is Cattail Moonshine & Milkweed Medicine: The Curious Stories of 43 Amazing North American Native Plants ($19.95) written by Tammi Hartung. Because milkweed was in the title I began by reading those pages. When we lived in New York City I was…
Gardening is about more than tools and plants. It is about knowledge and information - because the tools and plants alone won’t take us very far. I am a reader, so I depend on garden magazines to keep me up to date. Gifts of information include membership in a society or subscription to a magazine is an easy gift to arrange and a beautiful and useful gift to receive. One magazine, The American Gardener, comes to me through…
For me most holiday gifts for the gardener fall into two main categories, functional and informational. Functional gifts include the necessary tools a gardener needs. We all start out with fairly inexpensive tools, partly because as a beginning gardener we don’t really know how hard a tool will have to work. As we grow as a gardener we come to recognize sturdiness and good quality and buy, or are given, better tools. I was wandering through the…
The view from the window shows that we had our first snowfall, just over an inch, but it didn't last long. Temperatures mostly ranged in the 30s and 40s. I guess I am done putting the garden to bed. Our first complete year in the new garden draws to a close leaving us with a sense of satisfaction - and a list of things to do next spring.
It was on a snowy December 6 in 2007, the feast of St. Nicholas, that I inaugurated my Commonweeder blog. On this anniversary I'm taking a look at the last nine years, on the blog, in the garden, and in my life. That first post gave a hint that I was not only a gardener but a reader. I mentioned Eleanor Perenyi's wonderful book Green Thoughts, and a chapter that talked about the house and garden that was…
Several years ago a friend asked me to give her advice about her garden which she said was out of control and too much work. When I visited I could see an immediate problem; her paths were too narrow. Wider paths would make it possible to walk through the garden side by side with a friend, and even provide better working space when it was time to weed or divide the collection of lovely perennials that comprised her…
New England Grows! is a big landscaping tradeshow in Boston and I got to see old friends like Kate and Russ French of OESCO where a 20 foot scarecrow blew fiercely over the exhibit of great OESCO tools. I spoke to Linette Harlow at Pride's Corner Farms about the plants they grow for various plants you will find at garden centers in the spring, I loved this display of succulents growing in a slightly rotting log. I count…
Verrmiculture is worm farming. Worms are the gardener’s friend. They eat kitchen waste and turn it into valuable fertilizer called vermicompost. You too can be a vermiculturist, one who practices vermiculture and makes vermicompost, and you cannot begin too soon. When I visited Kate Bailey’s first grade last week to read to them, they were all excited and told me they had a thousand new pets in the classroom and could I guess what they were. I could…
Roast turkey is the iconic symbol of Thanksgiving, but in reality it is the vegetables that fill the groaning board. Sweet potatoes, with or without marshmallows, mashed potatoes, creamed onions, and roasted or mashed winter squash, are essential. I’ve been known to make the elaborate maquechoux, a mélange that includes corn, bacon, scallions, red bell peppers, tomato and thyme and basil. My daughter Betsy is now responsible for a mélange of white and sweet potatoes, beets, squash and…
While shopping at the Greenfield Farmers Market last year I met Danielle Smith at her Wild Rose Flower Farm booth. I found the name of her farm, Wild Rose, irresistible, of course, and she was always surrounded by a bounty of lovely spring bulbs, and later an array of dahlias, zinnias, sunflowers, delphiniums and all manner of other annuals. At the Winter Market I bought a wonderful wreath to hang on our new front door. All this summer…