Alternative Lawn for the Northeast
My wife – who is the mower of lawns in our partnership – has taken to mowing around any wildflowers she encounters. As a result, our rather sparse fescue lawn [...]
Thomas Christopher, Ranter Emeritus
Turning an Invasive Species – Black Locust – into a Resource
The black locust, insists its harvester Blue Sky, “is a much maligned tree.” A native of the central Appalachians and Ozark Mountains, it has extended its range into New England, [...]
Gardening for Carbon Storage
If there was a 12-step program for gardeners like me, I would begin each session of course by introducing myself to the room and then admit to my addiction: I [...]
Pollinator-Friendly Lawns
The weekend before last I had the pleasure of meeting Heather Holm, a great gardener and leading advocate for pollinators from Minneapolis. She has self-published two very useful (and attractive) [...]
Saving Seeds for Biodiversity
It’s called the ‘Mostoller Wild Goose’ bean. Sarah Mostoller found the first seeds in the crop of a wild goose that her son had shot in a mill race in [...]
Kudos to Ken Druse for Talking Climate Change Gardening
One of the virtues of gardening is that it brings its practitioners into intimate contact with natural systems. As I discovered as a young gardener many years ago, and a [...]
Cassian Schmidt’s Insights in Naturalism from Germany
A couple of weeks ago, I had the privilege of attending a lecture sponsored by the New York Botanical Garden, and it was eye-opening. The speaker was Cassian Schmidt, who [...]
The Case Against Earthworms
When I dug in my Berkshire garden this summer I found a host of earthworms. That, it turns out, is bad. I was raised to regard earthworms as the gardener’s [...]
How to Make Sweet Cider Hard
In my last post I wrote about hunting for the apples with which I make hard cider. Having done that – I’ve located two trees full of what appear to [...]
Apple Hunting Season
This is the time of year when I start scouting for apple trees. Neglected, venerable trees full of fruit that nobody wants. Not shiny, red, and flawless, ready to be [...]
Chipmunks may be cuter but they’re worse than rats in the garden
The other day, a visiting friend gasped when he saw a rat run across a corner of the suburban Connecticut yard where I garden during the week. I shuddered when [...]
Moose in my garden: the tracks are proof
I’ve posted before on this blog about the attraction of wildlife tracking in the garden. Garden wildlife, I noted then, reminds me of teenagers – the critters eat distressingly huge [...]