We are only halfway through January so I think we are still in new resolution season. Now that I am a garden blogger, as well as a garden columnist, I read other garden blogs. One of my favorite bloggers, Carol at May Dreams Gardens in Indiana has challenged gardeners to grow something new this year. Actually, Carol challenges us all to grow something new every year. It is fun to try something new, even if we never plant…
The skies are brilliant and the snow is pristine. Krishna surveys the snow-filled Sunken Garden at dawn and wonders why there are no cows, or milkmaids to thrill with his pipes. But my thoughts have gone beyond snow, to sweet soil and seeds. I could not resist the display of Botanical Interest Seeds at the Farmer's Coop in Greenfield yesterday. I will have my Castor Bean plant this year! And many colors of morning glories and bush beans…
In the February/March issue of Organic Gardening magazine, Gordon Hayward who gardens in Vermont, talks about our ‘food shed.’ I know about watersheds, that protect the quality of our water, and was amused when I heard people talk about their ‘view sheds’ the landscape view they enjoyed from their house, but I had never heard the term ‘food shed.” However, aware as I am of the 100 mile diet, I should have realized the term put me on…
December is not usually a good time to visit a small farm in action, but when I visited Daniel Botkin and his wife, Divya, at Laughing Dog Farm in Gill I got a tour of a thriving garden in the big hoop house (or long tunnel) and a lunch of delicious vegetable soup with bread and goat cheese made that very morning. This is local food at its finest. I had specifically gone to Laughing Dog Farm to…
Between the concern about GMO seeds and a difficult economy, gardeners are more and more interested in seed saving. The Seed Savers Exchange has been around for years and is now celebrating 35 years of helping people find and continue growing heirloom, open pollinated seed for hundreds of vegetables and flowers Kent and Diane Ott Whealy founded the SSE and you needed to be a member to get seeds (and they were free) from the owner of the…
Happy Halloween! One way to strike terror into this night of goblins and ghosts is to think of the fears that plants have generated over the centuries. Deadly nightshade was rightly understood to be a poison, but other members of the family, tomatoes, potatoes, eggplant and peppers were less deadly and more delicious. The large pale flower of datura, another member of the family, is beautiful but equally deadly. Not all peas (Lathyrus sativus) are benign, or all members…
You never know what you'll run into as you surf the garden blogs. Or where. Yolanda, in the Netherlands, on her beautiful blog Bliss is celebrating vegetables with a Beach Boys serenade. Check it out.
Late blight has infected my tomatoes. Yesterday afternoon I went out to pick more beans and noticed that the single dead tomato branch was now several dead branches on all six of my tomato plants. It is difficult to see in the photo against the straw mulch, but the reality was very clear. If there was any doubt, one look at the tomatoes made it imperative to take instant and radical action. I pulled up all the plants and…
Who would not want to belong to a group of people who not only grow giant pumpkins, but like to smash them, wear orange tuxedos, sail in pumpkin regattas, tour pumpkin patches and compete at fairs for the honor of growing the biggest pumpkin? Recently I attended a meeting of the Franklin County Giant Pumpkin Growers Association who haven’t yet, done all of these things, but they are in touch with other growers across the country…
“Grow Food Everywhere!” is Ricky Baruc’s enthusiastic motto. It doesn’t matter if the soil is bad, or if you have a bad back. At Seeds of Solidarity Farm in Orange Baruc and his wife Deb Habib have proved that food can be grown anywhere, by anyone. He said his secret is cardboard and worms. I will add he gets some aid from the beautiful Diemand Farm compost. His technique is simple. He clears the garden spot then lays…