Michele Owens, Ranter Emeritus
Life-altering conclusions about my 2008 veg garden
All the vegetable gardeners in my part of the world are complaining about what a weird year it's been, thanks to a late frost followed by a hot spell followed [...]
Buffalo Spirit
I know, Elizabeth has already published a photo of this Buffalo garden in an immigrant neighborhood, but it's worth revisiting because it breaks every rule of good gardening taste--and transcends [...]
To Buffalo’s Garden Walk – Ten Reasons I’m About To Drive Five Straight Hours of Boring Highway
Right now, I am busy scrubbing my dirty heels and dirty fingernails, getting ready to head to Buffalo's city-wide mass-insanity garden tour, Garden Walk, early tomorrow. The drive is dreadful: [...]
Love Song For The Potato
Sure, I grow fancy-pants crops like chiles and okra and celeriac. But my very favorite crop, right after the holy triumvirate of arugula, basil, and tomatoes? The humble potato. How [...]
Attacking Kitchen Gardening on Grounds of Inefficiency Is a Huge Waste of Time
Okay, all forms of bourgeois smugness are enraging, including, I suppose, the locavore movement and the sudden new interest in farming the backyard. I've noticed contrarians popping up in the [...]
Garden Primer – Always The Dirtiest Book On My Shelf
Workman Publishing has just released The Garden Primer: The Completely Revised Gardener's Bible. It is, as you may have gathered from the title, the completely revised edition of Barbara Damrosch's [...]
Can Biochar Save The World?
Just as the wildfires in California were raging most ferociously this week, I picked up New Scientist magazine and learned something that probably offers no consolation whatsoever for the scorched [...]
Why are the Catalogs Better Reading than the Magazines?
I was recently "selected" for a free issue of a gardening magazine called Garden Gate and dutifully settled into bed with it this week in order to report on this [...]
Elizabeth Schneider’s book is a vegetable gardener’s best friend
One of the most useful gardening books I've ever bought is not a gardening book at all, but a particularly smart encyclopedia, Elizabeth Schneider's Vegetables from Amaranth to Zucchini. I [...]
Nobody to talk to about gardening
Susan's garden club marching in the July 4th parade. Amy's recent post about garden clubs got me thinking about how lonely it is in modern America, being a [...]
Planting Potatoes – the Easy-Peasy Recipe for Clay Soil
It's tough to move from an established vegetable garden to a new one because you are generally giving up gorgeous soil groomed and fed over a number of years for [...]