Open View Gardens

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 family jokes about how when my husband heads out on a trip, Mother Nature lets loose. An albino robin appears just before he’s to leave. An owl hangs around in broad daylight, staring intently into the screened-in porch.  Bats flit about the house.  Birds get trapped in my studio. Coyotes prowl the garden to […]

  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 […]

I wait all year for Barbara’s tomatoes. I refuse to buy the imported, tasteless, watery tomatoes sold in the grocery store. Occasionally during the winter I buy canned San Marzano tomatoes to make sauce, but nothing compares to the sun-ripened tomatoes that come out of our garden. We grow three kinds of cherry tomatoes, ranging […]

Yesterday the wind blew hot and surly across the tall field grasses. Today the high dog days of midsummer have pooled around my feet. It is still but for the drone of heat-loving insects and the intermittent warning of a robin, the hissing of a house wren, the drink-your-tea-tea-tea call of the Eastern towhee. On […]

Yes, I’m writing about figs…again.  Elizabeth thinks I am obsessed with them.  And it’s true, I eat figs every day during their brief season (but I do that with strawberries and raspberries, too).  One of our fig trees is putting out sensational purple figs and the other is ripening a fat green variety that should […]

On Saturday we found the first figs of the season in our local co-op and on Sunday we picked our own ripe figs (far superior in flavor and texture to the store-bought). A month ago we wrote about the wonder of being able to grow figs in Vermont, and now we’re finally able to eat […]

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 […]