I use straw bales for insulation against the back of my house and then mulch with the damp, dark straw in the spring, but in a quest for mesclun seed, which I think I can still plant, I found an amazing account of gardening in and on straw bales–two seasons of vegetables on a very [...]

I was doing a little weeding today and under the cauliflowers found a lot of reddish plants that I realized were young amaranth plants, small because they’re shaded by the cauli leaves. I count on the amaranth to reseed itself every year. It grows to six feet and has strange dangling furry red flowers and [...]

This is an odd post to write from Beijing, but I took this photo some weeks ago and have been wanting to tell you about a wonderful result of planting native species: a great increase in insects, including butterflies of different types. And because we now have two types of milkweed, we have been enjoying [...]

Tom’s home from college and full of ideas for making our lifeways sustainable.
“Aren’t they already?” people ask, thinking that because I’ve written several books about eco living I must do things perfectly myself. But I’m a working mother and an American to boot, and definitely not perfect. I don’t do much driving, but [...]

I’ve been browsing for rainbarrels, thinking of ways we might make it easier to keep all the vegetable and flower beds watered this summer. The barrels themselves seem easy, and reasonably priced, but I’m trying to figure out how to get the water from the barrel to where it needs to be. In the course [...]

Second day of spring garden clean-up. I found this a surprising activity when I moved to New England: raking in the springtime? But now I am an old-timer and know that the tide of winter recedes here slowly and leaving much debris behind. Branches and leaves, mostly, but also clumps of sod, thrown up by [...]

I followed one of our cats, Jelly, outside this morning. There’s almost no snow left, and we’ve all been talking about spring this week because it’s been so warm (it’s going to be painful when winter comes back). I bent to pick up a plastic wrapper from my sunny border, which faces east, and saw [...]

“I am not a lover of lawns. Rather would I see daisies in their thousands, ground ivy, hawkweed, and even the hated plantain with tall stems, and dandelions with splendid flowers and fairy down, than the too-well-tended lawn.” W.H. Hudson, The Book of a Naturalist, 1919.
I am a lover of lawns, in moderation. There’s nothing [...]

This is the perfect time to harvest herbs from the garden, but I never think of it because summer seems barely to have arrived. But Rachel happened to ask about mint tea, which inspired me to locate, under some boxes of books, the drying rack I picked up at a tag sale last summer.
We’ve [...]

We’re having a party today—-pan-Asian theme—-so of course it’s going to rain. The last two big summer parties we’ve had brought torrential all-day downpours, with fabulous weather the next day!
But there is one thing that no longer troubles us about rain. Our basement stays dry these days, ever since we did some major landscaping [...]