Most of the landscaping around here came with the place. Contracting crews working on the house in 2002-03 were flustered that we were such sticklers about maintaining a tight construction envelope around the site, but I’m glad every day we were so insistent. On the south side of the house, native grassland begins about fourteen…
The season is over. The potatoes are dug, as are the carrots and the dinky onions. The kale, while green right up until an arctic front settled over us and drove temperatures below zero, is done for the season. The leaves of the cherry tree abruptly turned and dropped last week, after having lingered for…
My tastes don’t generally run toward clear favorites or coveting the “best” of this or that. I favor variety and contrast and have a tendency to be suspicious of my strongest biases, regarding them with clinical curiosity and trying to figure out where they’ve come from and whether they’re worth hanging on to. Evidently, though,…
For the first time in five or six years, I haven’t lost the garlic. I plant it in the fall, breaking a few heads up into individual cloves and digging them in like little bulbs. The garlic bed shifts from year to year, as do the locations of most of the garden crops. My riff…