On the last night of January it was 3 degrees below zero. Just 24 hours earlier, we had a soaking rainstorm, fog and flooding. The day before that it was 60 degrees. This sort of thing is more or less normal for Chicago; the only thing that would be abnormal in a Midwestern winter would […]
There were more catalogs than Christmas cards in the mailbox this year, starting back in November. I could have spent all my cookie-baking time dreaming of next year’s garden, but that is a treat for January. So I dutifully let the catalogs pile up until the right time, when the tree has been ground up […]
With the pots and pruners and weeders and spades hauled down to the basement, the question arises: Now or later? Cleaning, that is. Do I clean this stuff while I’m putting it away for the winter, or just jumble it all into the tool room and promise myself I’ll get around to the washing and […]
The leaves that have been swirling to the ground these last few weeks may be trash to some, but they are treasure to me. In our neighborhood, everybody but me rakes their leaves to the curb to be sucked up by giant vacuum vehicles and carted off to a commercial composting facility. I’m the crazy […]
The leaves started turning early this year, but not before the first little pumpkins appeared in the grocery store. It seems a little odd to have pumpkins on sale at the same time as zucchini, but not as odd as the fact that pumpkins and zucchini are the same species, Cucurbita pepo. “Pumpkin” is a […]
One of the ways I knew this wasn’t going to be an ordinary summer in my garden was when I noticed a chrysanthemum trying to bloom in May. Chrysanthemums are fall flowers! Well, sort of. In their native Asia they’re actually long-blooming late-summer flowers, which is how they came to be symbolically associated with longevity […]
My spring vegetable crop went all awry, because a combination of freakishly warm weather and general disorganization threw my timing off. I got the herbs and tomatoes set out, but I failed to get my usual two or three crops of salads or radishes before the seriously hot weather set in. But now – even […]
Everybody loves the hardy, disease-resistant shrub roses that have become so popular in the last couple of decades for their easy care and nonchalant reblooming. Many will bloom – and often rebloom after June – without deadheading, and survive even cold Midwestern winters without being swaddled. Some slow-release fertilizer in spring is welcome, but many […]
It’s all in a name. Scarlet runner beans, it turns out, are runners. Somebody gave me some seeds this spring and I tried starting them in little pots under lights, with a vague idea of having transplants that would later climb up something in the garden and be bright and colorful. Boy, did they climb […]
Gardeners get itchy in spring. The hand tries to wrap itself around a trowel uncontrollably, against the better judgment of the gardener, like something out of an old horror movie. We may know, rationally, that the risk of planting out tomatoes and other warm-season vegetables in cold soil with a chance of frost is too […]
In my part of the Midwest, April is the time that daffodils are in their glory and the wildflowers bloom. Supposedly. This April, most of my daffodils are already bloomed and dried up and gone. Tulips popped in the third week of March. Scilla and muscari bloomed simultaneously. Forsythia and redbud – normally the first […]
It’s getting on for the time when my checkbook burns a hole in my pocket. Not a credit card: Many plant sales don’t take credit cards. And plant sales offer me some of my best plants. For months now, the volunteers at my local conservatory have been nurturing unusual herbs for their annual herb sale. […]
