Twenty-seven years ago Norm Hirscheld of Greenfield visited a permaculture farm where he met his first red wigglers (Eisenia foetida). “I was awestruck by how you could get rich black compost from vegetable scraps right in your house,” he said. He decided right then to become a worm farmer himself and built a wooden box, providing holes for ventilation, and put in a sufficient amount of wet shredded newspaper for bedding. He sent away for his pound of…
The sky was blue and the ice was thick. I did not see any fish being harvested, but the fisher folk looked pretty happy and relaxed. I peeked at them on my way to the Greenfield Garden Club Annual Meeting, this year at the French King Restaurant. There was a good crowd. The room buzzed with the happy chatter of frustrated gardeners. The food was good and the conversation even better. The Greenfield Garden Club is a terrific…
The Greenfield Garden Club held its wreath-making workshop last evening at Chapley's Garden in Deerfield. Linda Tyler knew what she was doing and helped all the rest of us who didn't. Chapleys provided all manner of greenery from blue spruce to euonymus, rose hips, pine cones and I don't know what all - except that a lot of different and unique wreaths were being created all around me. Karen Helbig and I were working side by side. She was…
“I guess you can see I like water,” Jane Markoski said as she gave me a tour through her gardens. There was a birdbath in the shady entry garden, a trickling fountain as you turned the corner of the house, a bubbling faux millstone fountain at the corner of the barn, a lotus tub in the middle of a mixed shrub and perennial border, a small fish pond with a waterfall, and a larger fish pond with a…
These tours are over, but even these brief garden descriptions may be useful to others. When I visited Mary Manilla’s garden in Hawley this week it was a ribbon of green along the stream that borders the garden. By the time the Hawley Garden and Artisans Tour takes place on Saturday, July 11, there will be a river of color along the stream as the hundreds and hundreds of daylilies in every hue come into bloom. It…