Garden Rant

Do Pros Understand Amateurs?

Check out this fantastic New York Times Magazine piece by Pete Wells about the nonsense professional chefs dish out to home cooks–namely, the idea that all the prep work must be accomplished before cooking can begin. The concept even has a French name, mise en place.  The problem is,...

Putting my ear to the crucifers’ clock

Kale and collards looking extremely glamorous Twenty years of growing vegetables have convinced me that gardening, like comedy, is all in the timing. Other than being planted in sun and good soil, what vegetables mainly want is to be timed correctly.  And this is something that can only be...

Public Gardens

Greetings from Maine!  This week, I had the incredible experience of sailing on my friend Tom's Catboat from Somesville Sound to Little Cranberry Island.  I contributed nothing to the sailing endeavor, but I did have a profoundly satisfying nap in the romantic little cabin on the boat.  And then...

Is it the mushrooms or the mystery?

In John Stilgoe's beyond brilliant book about why our world looks the way it does, Common Landscape of America, 1580 to 1845, Stilgoe begins by examining the medieval European landscape that our American landscape eventually began to diverge from. In small European villages like the one I just visited...

Solution for invasives: saute ‘em!

I'm traveling, which is the only time I'd be indulging in the schizophrenic diet pictured above: Diet Coke and John Kallas's super-fun book Edible Wild Plants: Wild Foods from Dirt to Plate. I've been interested in eating more weeds ever since my friend Martha, a scholar of food, first...

Calling All Opinionated Gardeners

As Amy mentioned last week, we Garden Ranters will be on a panel at the Independent Garden Center show in Chicago on August 19 talking about ways in which garden centers can promote and sell greener living. Of course, the greenest thing you can possibly do in gardening is...

It’s Love, Not Blood, That Makes A Family

Mother hen and her genetically unrelated offspring I posted a little over a month ago about one of my three hens, who had been so broody for so long that I worried about her health.  Unable to break her of this broodiness, I finally just gave in and got...

Grafted Tomatoes–We Have a Lot of Winners!

Thanks to everybody who posted a comment about the grafted tomato giveaway. The nice people at Log House Plants just couldn't get enough of all of your comments, so they picked several winners.  Rather than track you each down individually, we're going to try this: Matt Pat Ginny K...

What’s That You Say? Grafted Tomatoes?

I've been hearing about these newfangled grafted tomatoes.  The promise of an heirloom tomato grown on modern, disease-resistant rootstock sounded almost too good to be true. And more than one tomato variety grafted onto a single rootstock?  Whoa.   Here's Ann Lovejoy to tell us more.  And yes, there's...

On-deck vegetable garden, the update

In my second year of growing food, I can now recognize a few plants (big thrill there), I'm growing only container-sized varieties of plants, and I've added a few more containers.  Also, this time I'm just growing my favorites.  That means no more peppers or zucchinis, though they performed...

Chef’s Garden is Centerpiece of Downtown Restaurant

Just last week I met a chef from the hot DC restaurant Poste Moderne Brasserie when he was volunteering at the Washington Youth Garden and he invited me to come see their courtyard garden.  Coincidentally, I worked in this historic building back in the '70s but hadn't seen it...

Washington Youth Garden Grows Food…and Jobs

  After yesterday's post about an organic gardening scam, how about a more positive sign of the times?  There's no better example than the Washington Youth Garden at the National Arboretum.  I dropped by recently to see what's new, and discovered not just deer fencing and other improvements, but...

The bra garden. Yes.

We can’t make this stuff up. If only we could. Kathy/Cold Climate Gardening gave me the heads-up about the ingenious rice-growing bra that Triumph, a Japanese lingerie maker, has devised. This is how it works: The pots can be filled with soil and rice seedlings, and the wearer waters...

I’ve Seen All The Wild Rivers I Ever Want To See

That immortal line belongs to one F. E. Dominy, whose lively obituary by Douglas Martin in the the New York TImes offers a fascinating glimpse into the history of farming, water, and the American landscape. Used to be the Sacramento River.  Now it’s Lake Shasta. Dominy was the long-time...

2010: Are the Gods Smiling?

Springs have been tricky in my part of the world in recent years–rainy, cold, and late.  Last year, I lost many of my vegetable seedlings to a frost June 1.   And climate scientists say that Northeasterners can expect more of the same–high precipitation events that make spring crops...

Breeding compost (and produce) out of the dead land

 Blighted is actually the correct word, though parts of Buffalo’s East Side looked all but dead on the quiet Saturday morning I stopped by to take another look at the Wilson Street Urban Farm. As I posted last year, this project was finally sanctioned on city-owned land last May. ...

Possible model for healthy school food

Here's an encouraging story of how one charter school in D.C. has managed to serve really healthy food to their kids. The school's founder and chef explain how this was achieved with the help of a "small, superbly effective" nonprofit with funding from Kaiser Permanente, equipment donated by Whole...

Grow your own what?

Why I’m not a Permaculturist

by Guest Ranter Lee Reich, PhD I wish I had a catchy name for the kind of farmdening I do. (A farmden is more than a garden, less than a farm; I used to have a garden, now I have a farmden.) I wish I had a catchy word...