Category: green gardening

If there were to be a contest for the most sorely neglected culinary herb, lovage would certainly rank among the top five candidates. I first encountered this member of the parsley family two decades ago, not so much because I’d heard tales of its tastiness, but because I was curious to learn how a plant [...]

I was watching the national news last night, and saw that the egg recall due to salmonella has been expanded to half a billion eggs. Think about it: half a billion. And the insidious thing this time is that the disease is contained inside the egg, transmitted directly to the yoke from the infected ovaries [...]

One of the things I find odd about garden writing is that while there is generally more than ample advice about sowing and planting food crops, there is comparatively little information about harvesting, which, after all, is the entire point of the exercise. And often times, proper technique is critical. Take garlic for instance. Garlic [...]

This year for the first time in a long time I was able to get a good germination from notoriously hard to germinate carrots, and the key to my success was using floating row cover. Tacked directly onto the soil, the cover provided just enough moisture to allow the carrots to sprout without drying out [...]

A month or so back I wrote about lilacs, and the uncanny ability their scent possesses of being able to transport you out of time and place to sunny moments of your past.  But for me, there’s another plant with similar abilities – though through a very different manner of delivery – that’s just now [...]

For those of you who garden in a large swath from Georgia to Maine, you may remember last year as the season without tomatoes. Late blight, a ruthless mold disease eliminated every plant in my garden – and in the garden of everyone else I knew.  Rumored to have begun in a shipment of tomatos [...]

If you’re at my house for brunch, chances are scrambled eggs will be on the menu. Most of my guests accept a spoonful or two, anticipating a pleasant accompaniment to sausages, waffles, or blue berry pancakes. Then they take a bite. The conversation usually goes like this: “Wow! These eggs are fantastic. What’s in them?! [...]

Every spring, I marvel at the crowds of people buying flats and flats of expensive annual and vegetable seedlings at nurseries and box stores. For expediency’s sake, that’s fine; but for better economy, and for better gardening, you can save a tremendous amount of money, and grow a much wider variety of plants, if you [...]

Part Two of an Occasional Series on Tips for Designing the Home Landscape There exists a curious phenomenon in our country found in few others around the world: The mania for the perfect, weed-free Great American Lawn. The word mania is apt, for this passion for wide swathes of unblemished grass is like a disease [...]

Most people don’t associate Denver with gardening (I know I certainly didn’t) but just having come back from the Mile-High City, I want to tell you that there’s a lot of great horticulture going on in Colorado. As usual, I was there on business, giving a series of three new lectures at the Denver Flower [...]