It began inauspiciously. Every year, the Cape Cod Organic Gardeners, who patiently tolerate our presence on their roster, put in a bulk supplies offer through NOFA, the Northeast Organic Farming Association. The order consists of several thousand pounds of soil, seed starter, compost, fertilizer, and various other supplies. So far, just about all we’ve brought [...]
I know you’ve been looking forward to another in my gripping Agronomy Series, so you’ll be happy to know that I got my soil test results back from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst lab. Now that I’m an adult, I don’t take tests very often. Although I’m tested all the time, it’s in the [...]
It’s a mystery to me why anyone who actually knows something about gardening would bother following my misadventures here, but there is nevertheless evidence that I have an extremely well-informed readership. When I posted about testing my soil, the Starving commentariat weighed in with suggestions about raised beds, soil amendments, and no-dig techniques – complete [...]
Let’s face it. Our gardening efforts have thus far produced results that are, shall we say, less than spectacular. Last season, a good half of our tomato plants simply refused to grow. The cucumbers produced a few gnarled, yellow specimens. The collards were obliterated by some unidentified green-eating insect. I believe we totaled six butternut [...]
If you come here often, you’ve heard me mention our friends Al and Christl. Besides being our friends, they’re the people we want to be when we grow up. They’re older than we are – in their seventies, I think – and they’ve done, or are still doing, a lot of what we do. We [...]
When we lived in New York, drought was an abstract concept. I understood that, for people across large swaths of the world, it meant a serious threat to lives and livelihoods, but for us it meant that the weather was nice and that we didn’t flush the toilet. Now, though, I’m getting just the faintest [...]
This morning, right after we found the tomato that was finally ripe but now had a huge bite taken out of it, we saw the tell-tale signs of hornworm damage – the denuded stems, the gnawed-on leaves. Hornworms have evolved to look very much like the plants they eat, so they’re hard to spot. Kevin [...]
It was back in 1965 when Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson did their now-famous experiment about the effect that teacher expectations have on student performance. They gave an intelligence test to a whole schoolful of elementary school students, and then told their teachers that 20% of them were marked for extraordinary intellectual growth and achievement [...]
I am not having the last laugh in the gardening department. I had high hopes, going in. After last year, which was so wet and cold that nothing grew until well into July, I saw our warm May and weeks of sun as harbingers of lush tomatoes and big, firm cucumbers, succulent eggplants and full, [...]
In the nutrition world, fruits and vegetables get lumped together all the time. They’re the things that are good for you, the things you’re supposed to eat more of. They occupy the same tier on the food pyramid, the same section of the grocery store, the same place in dieticians’ hearts. Fruits and vegetables are [...]
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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