Open View Gardens

I’ve just returned from a work trip to southwestern Montana where it seems that most people don’t plant gardens. In towns, out on the ranches, I saw little sign of tomatoes or lettuces, even kale or broccoli tended in neat rows or clustered in raised beds. And vegetables that do grow?  They fold up early. […]

On a table in my house sits what most people, including my entire extended family, find quite bizarre, something they cannot align with what they know of me.  After all, I pride myself on being an ecological gardener who tries to consider the impact of my actions on all the inhabitants of the garden, not […]

My father was among the world’s most enthusiastic record keepers. As a historian, he stacked details of time, place and event neatly in his mind. On index cards he noted the noteworthy including nagging holes in his coin and stamp collections. Even after he died, we discovered more: deep within his desk he’d squirreled a […]

My sister-in-law is about to come down with a bad case of mid-summer gardening fatigue. I can sense it creeping up on her—and many others– as it does every year right about now, just as the birds are quieting down from their early nesting hoopla, just as the sun hits its warm stride, just as […]

Published in the Addison Independent PATCHwork Column 4/21/11 Some call them uninvited guests, interlopers, opportunists, ne’er-do-wells, even weeds. Earnest gardeners work hard at banishing these trespassers from vegetable beds, pulling them in fall and spring, evicting them when they pop up during the summer. It makes sense, I suppose. If left to their druthers, they’ll […]

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 […]

In honor of St. Patrick’s Day today, my first article of the new  season for the Addison Independent, has, naturally, an Irish theme: Irish Roots Here, But No Cabbage If I stayed true to my roots, today I’d be in the basement planting cabbage seeds under the grow lights, then shoveling snow off a raised […]

After a week immersed in wedding preparations, from picking wildflowers to baking pies, to sprucing up the gardens to making pre-wedding feasts from the garden harvest and the neighboring sheep farm’s lamb, pork and sausage, we’re tired! But the peppers need picking, the tunnels covering, the lemon verbena drying, the tomatillos pickling, so out to […]

This week’s PATCHwork column for the Addison Independent: Hot Pepper Mania My house smells of hot peppers.  Who knew that a dehydrator filled with them would send clouds of pungent oil into the air.  At this rate I could probably produce highly effective pepper spray, may soon have to don goggles.  It’s a good thing […]

I can go months without thinking of something or someone and then a smell, a glimpse, a sound, or a dream plunges me right back to a time, a place, an experience. We all experience the sensory triggers of memory. The smell of freshly ground curry always sends me back to two places and times: […]