The chain of gain is mostly from the rain

A frame of Big Bee. The white in the corner is honey.

When we lived in New York, drought was an abstract concept. I understood that, for people across large swaths of the world, it meant a serious threat to lives and livelihoods, but for us it meant that the weather was nice and that we didn’t flush the toilet. Now, though, I’m getting just the faintest [...]

Give a hen a hornworm

Blech.

This morning, right after we found the tomato that was finally ripe but now had a huge bite taken out of it, we saw the tell-tale signs of hornworm damage – the denuded stems, the gnawed-on leaves.
Hornworms have evolved to look very much like the plants they eat, so they’re hard to spot. Kevin and [...]

High-stakes gardening

Kevin's tomato trellis

It was back in 1965 when Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson did their now-famous experiment about the effect that teacher expectations have on student performance. They gave an intelligence test to a whole schoolful of elementary school students, and then told their teachers that 20% of them were marked for extraordinary intellectual growth and achievement [...]

The nature conspiracy

Decapitated cucumber seedlings

I am not having the last laugh in the gardening department.
I had high hopes, going in. After last year, which was so wet and cold that nothing grew until well into July, I saw our warm May and weeks of sun as harbingers of lush tomatoes and big, firm cucumbers, succulent eggplants and full, ferny [...]

Berried alive

Raspberries by the truckload

In the nutrition world, fruits and vegetables get lumped together all the time. They’re the things that are good for you, the things you’re supposed to eat more of. They occupy the same tier on the food pyramid, the same section of the grocery store, the same place in dieticians’ hearts. Fruits and vegetables are [...]

Making the bed

Strawberry bed, before

I’ve never been much of a bed-maker. It seems silly to spend a lot of time on fixing the sheets and blankets when only Kevin and I will see the bed from morning until night, when we just mess it up again. If I make it at all, I tend to try and get rid [...]

Well-constructed

Instant cold frame

My husband is a genius.
This particular manifestation of his genius came about because I didn’t think ahead. I had the brilliant (!) idea of planting romaine lettuce in the cold frame. We could start it very early, I figured, and have our first crop in May, before some of our other plants are even in [...]

Let the gardening begin

Our cold frame -- that's our composter in the background

Today is the last day of February, and we planted our first seeds of the season.
It’s just an experiment. We don’t know if it will work. We planted two kinds of romaine lettuce in our cold frame. One was a standard-issue Burpee, and the other was a fancy-pants organic Thompson and Morgan.
Last year, we used [...]

Too much of a good thing

Back in 2000, psychologists Sheena Iyengar of Columbia University and Mark R. Lepper of Stanford published the results of an interesting study that shed light on how people make choices.
In their experiment, the choosers were customers of a grocery store in Menlo Park, California called Draeger’s. (They bill it as “upscale,” and I’ll vouch for [...]

Just sow

Avian interest in our cover crop seeds

Ah, the things couples fight about. Money. Kids. Sex. The number of pounds of winter rye seed required to cover a 500-square foot garden.
It wasn’t like we came to blows or anything, but it was a distinct disagreement.
We decided to put in a cover crop this year. A cover crop, for you non-gardeners out there, [...]

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