Home composting is good for you and your family, your garden and the planet. It's a simple task. All you need is common household and garden waste, air, a bit of heat, moisture and time for the organic materials to break down into a rich, loamy soil-like material that...
June is the month of wine and roses. Look at their beauty. Inhale the fragrance. Watch the buds change from day to day. Cut some for the table. And open a nice bottle for you must have wine with roses. Roses are a very special hobby. There are old roses, new roses,...
Bird feeders are a great way to encourage quick backyard visits by local and transient birds, but a properly sized, built and installed birdhouse will ensure more permanent avian residents. Sure, you can buy birdhouses of all shapes and sizes online and have it...
In winter, architectural design and its hard shapes, of stone, or concrete, are the things that capture one’s eye. Evergreens surround them with the only color of winter. But when everything else is dead or sleeping, it is those hard shapes that define the design....
Look about you. Winter gives us information in unexpected ways. For instance, you can tell the temperature outside just by looking at the rhododendrons. At 32 degrees, they curl up. About like a cigar. If they curl even more tightly, like a cigarette, it’s about 20...
Today I picked a pint of lovely raspberries. My fall crop. They never fail to fruit. Overhead my dogwood turned maroon. A friend brought a bag of her extra tomatoes. Every serious backyard gardener has too many squash and big cucumbers, which are given to neighbors....
The May garden is so, so beautiful. Breath taking. Azaleas full, flowering trees coming and going, rhododendrons beginning, irises, spring flowers, wild flowers. Small, bright green leaves sprouting on the shade trees. Each day something new comes out to delight the...
Last summer gardeners across numerous states reported an outbreak of impatiens downy mildew, a pathogen that can turn a healthy patch of impatiens diseased in short time, given the right weather conditions. The disease will infect common and double impatiens, although...
Punxsutawney Phil stuck his head outside on February 2, 2013 (Groundhog Day) and did not see his shadow. So that famous woodchuck announced to the world that winter was over and spring would arrive soon. A few days later we had the worst snowstorm in decades. So much...
The world is changing in this year. We do not wake up anymore and go out to milk the cows. A century ago, 90% of people farmed. Today it's about 2%. The steam engine played a part, as did the oil industry, rural electrification during the recession of the 1930's,...
