Gardening, farming, and Verlyn Klinkenborg

The town's compost pile, available to all residents!

I am going to say it out loud.  I don’t enjoy gardening. Yesterday, I was ready to say ‘I hate gardening,’ but I slept on it and a new day convinced me that wasn’t really true. There are parts of gardening I don’t mind (seed starting, watering), and one I actively enjoy (harvesting!). Yesterday, though, [...]

Fruits of our labors

cantaloupe

There are some jobs that are best left to professionals. Plumbing. Aircraft maintenance. And, I’m convinced, melon growing. Every spring, we’ve planted one kind of melon or another, but in a lottery-ticket spirit. We don’t really expect any melons but, hey, you never know. Really, though, we did know. We weren’t going to get any [...]

Overcuked

turkey and cukesc

Can a surfeit of cucumbers be said to be a bounty? I’m thinking no. It is, instead, a testament to bad planning. In May, the idea of healthy, vigorous cucumber vines flourishing in the hoophouse and growing a robust crop of cool, crisp cucumbers is very appealing. So appealing that I planted seven – seven! [...]

The great green hope

See!  See!

This year, we went way out on a horticultural limb. Last year, we planted tomatoes, eggplants, peppers, and cucumbers in the hoophouse. The cucumbers did pretty well, but succumbed to mildew fairly early in the season. We got a few tomatoes, but the heat got so intense that a lot of the flowers fell off. [...]

I hate hornworms

turkey with hornworm

It’s time to play every gardener’s favorite summertime game: Find the Hornworm. It’s a lot like Where’s Waldo, but with tomatoes at stake. I bear hornworms a particular antipathy. Other pests seem so incidental. They exist out there in the world, and they’re hungry, so they eat your vegetables. But a hornworm is not incidental. [...]

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