Category: urban gardening

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Several years ago my sister Cindy and I traveled to England. We passed a few delightful days in London, then went down to Dorset to spend a week at a small inn that specializes in garden tours. The setting was utterly charming, a 17th century thatched building nestled in a tiny village in the thick [...]

If I were to tell you that there were a neglected group of trees, shrubs, perennials, and annuals that could provide excellent color to even the dreariest corner of your landscape, would you be interested? If I were further to say that these plants did so throughout the growing season, without the normal gardener’s headaches [...]

Every since I was a little boy, I’ve had a fascination with bricks. I know this may sound a bit strange, but it’s true. While other kids were entertaining themselves with board games or erector sets, I could usually be found in the sandbox, playing with my favorite toys: a dump truck, a front-end loader, [...]

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 Three of an Occasional Series on Tips for Designing the Home Landscape As spring rolls finally rolls around here in Boston, and people start to spend more time outdoors enjoying the fine weather, my clients inevitably ask me about ways to increase privacy. Essentially, there three options to block unsightly views or to enclose [...]