Do you want the good news or the bad news? We’ll start with the good news. The good news is that our hoophouse has successfully extended our growing season. Granted, it’s gotten an assist from the warmest winter in human memory, but it still felt good to be out there in January, harvesting the parsnips [...]
This year, in planning our garden, we made a mistake. Surprising, eh? We planted a lot of winter squash. We picked two varieties: Delicata, and a giant kind I don’t know the name of but what we call Sasquash. We chose Delicata because it is supposed to taste very good. We chose Sasquash because it [...]
If there were statistics on such a thing, I would be willing to bet that the data would show that chicken owners are much more likely than your average American to have a garden. Chicken-keeping and vegetable-growing come from closely related impulses. You want to eat eggs, you want to eat squash, and you like [...]
When I lived in San Francisco, I had the pleasure of paying the occasional visit to a woman named Frieda. Her last name is lost to me, but I remember vividly how much I enjoyed spending time with such an erudite, interesting human being. She was a mathematician by training, but she seemed to know [...]
I have a horticultural mystery on my hands, and it’s weird, weird, weird. One of the plants that seems to thrive in our hydroponic system is peppers. Although they’re a little tall and weedy, they’re nice and green, with lots of flowers. Until about a week ago, I thought we were going to have a [...]
If there’s a garden jinx, I’m about to bring it down on my head. I’m going to say it out loud. As we head toward mid-summer, there are plants in our garden that actually look like they might, some days soon, yield food. The squash plants have blossoms. The pepper plants have tiny little proto-peppers. [...]
Anyone who believes that the earth was created for the benefit of us, the humans, clearly doesn’t garden. Every day spent trying to grow edible plants is a lesson that nature, of her own accord, has no interest in sustaining us with her bounty. The earth – at least my little section of it – [...]
Watering is a fact of gardening. Plants need water and, unless the weather is rainier than you want it to be, you have to give it to them. You can do this with a system of hoses and pipes, in which case your effort stops being watering and starts being irrigation. Or you can stand [...]
The problem with gardening is that you have to do it in the garden. This is our third season trying to bring our “soil” up to snuff, and there are so many variables, and so many opinions on what to do about those variables, that I feel like I’m just guessing. You amend to the [...]
Like just about every gardener in a 500-mile radius, we use winter rye as a cover crop. We sow it in the late fall, and sprouts before the really cold weather sets in. Then, miraculously, it stays green throughout the winter. It even grows a bit, if there’s a warm spell. Then, in spring, it [...]
Tamar Haspel has been writing about food and health for over a decade. She recently moved from Manhattan to Cape Cod. She’s adjusting well. [Read More …]
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