Seed catalogs arrive in the mail and I start to plan next year’s vegetable garden, an annual ritual as entrenched as those of any holiday. This winter I have a new focus, a resolution to grow heirloom vegetable varieties in Marjorie’s garden.
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By sunrise on Monday, Marjorie’s garden lay beneath 15 inches of new snow, a blanket of white yet to be disturbed by dogs or their keepers. Only the bones of the fruit and vegetable garden are now …
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A lot of Maine gardeners rely on wood-burning stoves and fireplaces to stay warm in winter, resulting in an abundance of wood ashes. An average cord of wood, depending on wood type and combustion efficiency, will yield a 5-gallon bucket of ashes. Should these ashes be used in the garden?
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There are too many new annual flower varieties for 2009. The National Garden Bureau is promoting 45 varieties (compared to 26 new vegetables), an imposing list of introductions from plant breeders …
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What would be the perfect Christmas gift for each of the gardeners on your list this year? I mean true gardeners, people with a passion for cultivating and nourishing the soil, those who do their own …
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Each winter, from late November through February, this gardener survives by searching the pages of seed catalogs for something special, a new variety that must grow in Marjorie’s garden come spring or summer.
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According to All-America Selections, an organization devoted to promoting new flower and vegetable varieties with superior garden performance, there is a trend in gardening toward edibles. People are …
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As writer and gardener Rebecca Solnit points out in her article “The Most Radical Thing You Can Do” (Orion, November/December 2008), the word “radical” comes from the Latin word for root. Gardeners rooted in the soil of their gardens always have worked diligently to keep it healthy and productive.
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There are deciduous trees that astonish us with the intensity of their autumn foliage — sugar maple and red maple, of course — and then there are trees with more subtle fall color, yet uncommon …
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Last week’s column on Oriental bittersweet, Celastrus orbiculatus, prompted several readers to inquire about native alternatives to this non-native invasive vine. Other readers wanted to learn …
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Driving west through Machias, down the stretch of Route 1 that parallels the Machias River, I glanced to my right just in time to spot a sandwich-board display of seasonal wreaths, including one made from Oriental bittersweet (Celastrus orbiculatus). Two people, a man and a woman, were huddled in the back of the pickup parked next to the display.
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This past long weekend, we traveled across Massachusetts into the heart of autumn. Along the way, I introduced Marjorie to old friends.
Our first stop on Saturday was Mount Auburn Cemetery in …
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Tree diversity creates resilient landscapes
Typically in October, as you look west coming into Ellsworth on Main Street, you see the banks of the Union River turned muddy yellow with the fall …
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As some of you know, this was a dismal year for raspberries. We picked a few handfuls of the earliest berries while working in the garden, but then, as the main crop matured, the rains came. Ripe …
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As a boy growing up in rural Alabama, just across the Chattahoochee River from Columbus, Ga., I often spent my late summer afternoons following an English setter through a cornfield.
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September in Eastport is a feast for the eyes. The native landscape cascades down granite escarpments into backyards and roadsides and you are surrounded by color, bright orange-red berries of mountain ash, pink and blue wild raisins, sky-blue asters bunched among the lichen-crusted rocks and along the deer paths, carpets of dark-green juniper and blueberry.
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The arborvitae Thuja occidentalis, a tree called cedar in Maine, can live for 300 years and lift its horizontal branches 60 feet or more into the sky.
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When I was a boy — I’m going back 45 years here — I hunted bobwhite quail with my father and our English setter, Priscilla. Every Saturday from November to February, we followed Prissy through South Georgia cornfields, sometimes just the two of us, more often with one of Dad’s friends, usually Stanford Ginn.
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