Open View Gardens

I’m trying to break a bad gardening habit. I’m trying to resist the urge to over-plant, to stuff the vegetable beds to bursting point no matter how good it makes me feel. You see, when visitors ask for a tour of my gardens, I do a lot of apologizing– for the small size of the […]

It’s warm outside—warm—and has been for three days.  A thunderstorm blew through this morning, and the grass is responding with green, the trees with buds, the birds with song. The phoebes and flickers are back; the peepers sang for the first time last night. I’ve finally informed the birds that gleaning season is done in […]

Looking out the window right now, I’m hard pressed to declare winter’s demise.  It is snowing … on April 4.  And it’s windy.  Raw. Not nice at all, especially when I want to get outside and start planting some things under the tunnels!  My garden notes from last year tell me that it was HOT […]

I’m sure there are a number of April Fool’s posts about the snow falling in New England right now.  But I’m taking a different tack on April and a slow spring with this week’s column for the Addison Independent. Slow Gardening: Spring Takes its Time, and So Does the Garden As spring hems and haws […]

Because we have one big winter storm forecast for Friday–naturally on April Fool’s–I thought it important to keep thinking spring: Down by the front stream

  Click the audio player for the guest post     Letting the garden speak for itself…

Cross-posted at Eating Well Magazine Garden Blogs. In the depths of winter, I’ll succumb to temptation and buy a small burgundy head of chioggia radicchio at our local natural foods cooperative.  I’m shocked at the price of a green that in my experience couldn’t be easier to grow.  Perhaps people think that because of its […]

Cross-posted on Eating Well Magazine’s website: Along with my friend and garden-writing cohort, painter Kate Gridley, I am starting a new season of writing for The Addison Independent, and blogging about healthy gardening for Eating Well Magazine.  I will cross-post those articles and entries here as well as continue to chronicle the new season at […]

I love to make pizza. There’s little as satisfying as kneading dough and having it scent the house with its yeasty goodness during the day as it rises, and to play around with flavor combinations for the topping, and then to share it with family and friends. I rarely use tomato sauce (homemade or not) […]

It’s snowing. Hard.  On April 28 in the Champlain Valley of Vermont.  Two days ago I spent seven hours in a t-shirt hauling dirt around new garden beds (we’re doubling the size of the already large garden), planting potatoes, weeding, cheering on the rattling bumblebees and softly whirring honeybees at their work among the blossoming […]