Open View Gardens

Wouldn’t you know it–just as I vow to rein in my sprawling gardens this season, even more gorgeous and enticing seed catalogs arrive from suppliers, some of which I haven’t even heard of before.  The Natural Gardening Company of California, for instance, which touts its position as the “oldest certified organic nursery in the United […]

I’ve stopped buying pine nuts–except when I find fresh Spanish ones at Sahadi’s when I visit my daughter in Brooklyn.  The only sort available around here are flown in from China–too far for something that needs refrigeration and careful handling–and the $30/pound price is beyond affordable.  Perfect pine-nutty pestos and some Italian cakes and cookies […]

  Listen to Barbara read the post. I stopped growing corn a few years back.  For good reason.  It takes up precious garden real estate and inevitably gets snatched by some clever critter or other the night before I plan to pick it. Just as people line up for local chicken-pie suppers around here, I […]

A Note from Barbara:  I have learned more than I can say from Nancy White, one of the foremost thinkers on online communities (read her book), incredible graphic facilitator (see her work), lover of chocolate, and good friend.  Here I learn lessons gleaned from gardening in a sodden place. A Note from Nancy: My friend […]

Our fourth guest writer, Barbara (Bee) Dieu, takes us to Brazil where she is an educator working at the intersections of language learning, multi-literacies and professional development in online contexts.  Over the years I have learned many things from her about teaching and learning online, about working across and between cultures and about being fearless […]

As our third guest blogger, I’m delighted to have my friend and teacher, Bryan Alexander, a leading thinker on digital media–see his wonderful new book, The New Digital Storytelling and follow him on Twitter (if you can keep up!)–, a blogger on all things gothic, and a homesteader who  lives 20 minutes from me but […]

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 […]

Cross-posted at Eating Well Magazine. And here, for all these years, I thought raised beds were the way to go… I’m reading an interesting (and controversial) book about gardening in post-peak-oil times: Gardening When It Counts, by Steve Solomon. He  would have me abandon my intensive gardening techniques including the raised beds (the soil dries […]

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 […]