Getting Ready for Fall

Fall has snuck up on me. All through August and September I had a list of garden chores in the back of my mind, things I wanted to get done before October. Even so it seemed very far away until late Friday night, when it suddenly hit me that Monday would be October 1st. That meant my seed garlic would be arriving in the mail this week and probably the flower bulbs I ordered many months ago too. There were beds to be cleared and bales of straw to procure and cold frames to build. Continue reading →

September in the Garden

For weeks I’ve been resisting the inevitable, not quite ready to accept that fall was on its way and that the plants in the garden would soon start winding down. But then all of a sudden about a week ago that little switch flipped inside my brain. I’m starting to get excited about eating soup and wearing sweaters again. Friday evening I went over to the garden and I was suddenly struck by how tired everything looked. The sunflowers were about to keel over and the squash vines had nearly all withered. Continue reading →

August in the Garden

Summer is really slipping away now and I’m not quite ready for it. I know that in a few weeks I’ll be happy for things to slow down in the garden and I’ll want to eat apples and winter squash and I might be ready to start wearing socks again. But for now I want to keep eating watermelon and I want it to still be light out at 8 o’clock at night and I want to go for at least a few more swims. But fall is creeping up and I’m thinking about cold frames again. This weekend I put up my first batch of tomatoes for winter and planted fall greens where the beans used to be.

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Salsa Verde

Mexican food is a staple of my diet, and living in New York City I always took for granted that I could walk down to the corner store and pick up a pound or two of tomatillos any time I wanted them. Now that I live in a much smaller town, I’ve found that tomatillos can be much harder to come by. When I signed up for my community garden plot, tomatillos were at the top of my list of things to grow. Continue reading →