Category: Traditional 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 [...]

Sometimes I feel as if the lawn is the one calling the shots in my yard, not the other way round. That’s particularly true when I am pushing a mower in 95º heat, or paying an exorbitant electricity bill after a season of lawn irrigation. (Electricity, as I pump irrigation water from our old, 1852 [...]

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 [...]

Few people realize that gardening is as much driven by current fashion as are most other aspects of popular culture. Take annuals for instance. You can hardly move about the nursery these days without bumping into some newly discovered or hybridized cultivar (often to the detriment of older varieties – just try for instance, finding [...]

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 [...]

There is something very satisfying having a few hens about the place… John Brooks,  A Country Garden This morning I stepped with no small trepidation back into the world of chickens. I’ve had chicks here before, many times in fact, over the last 20 years, but the last two occasions proved disastrous: weasels got into [...]

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 [...]

Well, it’s almost solstice, and the annual garlic harvest has once again come to a head. (I know, I know – I couldn’t resist.)  But seriously: the individual cloves I planted last November have overwintered, sprouted, and have now formed 2′ tall plants, ready to flower. These blossoms, twisty floral spikes called  “necks” in the [...]

To my way of thinking, a relaxing, well-designed terrace or patio is the most important feature of the entire back yard. It’s here, after all, that you get to reap the rewards of all that hard labor – hours spent weeding, mulching and planting come to fruition when you sit down in a comfortable chair [...]