Gardening, such as it is

Predictions call for a hard frost tonight. If we don't get one, we may have a few more tomatoes and the tiny zucchinis may have time to get big enough to contribute to part of a meal. However, we're close to closing out our gardening experiment for the year. It has not been a blazing … Read more

After we built and filled the new raised beds for a kitchen garden, we got pummeled with hail. Repeatedly. We even had another hailstorm last week that knocked out one of the largest providers to our farmers' markets. The Community Supported Agriculture farms have been hard hit, and have been helping each other out, depending … Read more

One of my favorite phrases is the I Ching's "perseverance furthers." Around here, it's the only thing that does. Almost everything takes much longer to accomplish than I think it should. Last week, an author I've been working with and I sent a book manuscript to its editor-at-the-publisher (I've been its developmental and line editor, … Read more

We've been working on the raised beds between deadlines, but a few minutes ago had reason (again) to be very happy we haven't gotten the plants installed: That's hail (again). It's our neighbor's trailer, right next to our driveway. Those clumps of ice are ricocheting off our roof. Here's some of what accumulated in a … Read more

I grew up around gardens in the Midwest, and my mother and my sister both garden, and I didn't notice that I had trouble growing things in the Pacific Northwest and New England, but so far this semiarid bit of the West has not encouraged my efforts. I did manage a few tomatoes and herbs … Read more