A noun. A verb. A blog.
Peanuts were in the news this morning*. This interested me, as I recently met peanuts in their growing state for the first time. The situation was an urban garden within spitting distance of downtown Indianapolis, which I’ll write about later. Of course most people know that peanuts are not nuts, but legumes, making them cousins […]
If you cross-pollinated the computing and home canning worlds, you might not expect the result to be so delicious. Yet, this is what makes Yes, You Can!, Daniel Gasteiger’s modern guide to food preservation, such a useful addition to the kitchen bookshelf. We were impressed with our review copy as soon as it arrived. Gasteiger is […]
Clavate tortoise beetle on a chewed potato leaf. Note that teddybear shape on its back. Noticing some pellet holes in my potato leaves, I wondered if we’d been hit by flea beetles. Then I saw what looked like a small fleck of bird droppings on the leaf. When flicked, it moved. That’s when I first […]
Upside down in this pic, these onion sets form at the top of the stem There aren’t too many do-nothing perennial vegetables, but one of them is the Egyptian walking onion, Allium cepa var. proliferum. That variety name, proliferum, isn’t because these onions produce well, although they do. It comes from the botanical term proliferation […]
A tomato plant is indeed a beautiful thing. Don’t throw out that coffee cup! Don’t even toss it in the blue bin! They make great seed starting pots. Poke a hole in the bottom, fill with soil, and plant a few tomato seeds, or anything you want to start from seed. At planting time I […]
Heard of companion planting? It’s the concept of putting plants together – ones that attract pollinators, let’s say, with fruiting plants that need pollinating. In that spirit, I’ve just read two books on vegetable growing that make perfect companions. The first is Garden Rant-er Michele Owens’ Grow the Good Life: Why a Vegetable Garden Will Make You […]
Little did I think that when I dropped by The Stop Community Food Centre Green Barn at the Wychwood Barns on Thursday that Jamie Oliver would be hot on my heels. Sure enough, the super chef, food activist and all round cute guy visited The Stop the very next morning. Ah, my almost-brush-with-greatness. In the […]
Savoy cabbage is one of many cole crops that like a touch of frost. With a few exceptions (we still have some carrots to harvest), we wrapped up our community garden plot back in October. But, next year, I won’t be so hasty. The pictures here, snapped a day or so ago, are reminders that […]
Well grown vegetables can be highly ornamental As Sonia Day writes in the Toronto Star, a Toronto family has been ordered by the City to replace their front yard vegetable garden… with sod. Yep, sod. It’s a bit of a shock, with all this talk of food security. The garden clashes with a transportation by-law, […]
How charming to see a word as tricky as “chlorophyll” correctly written in learning-to-print letters! Even more charming to think that the knowledge came from a plant that children had grown themselves from seed, transplanted, tended and soon would taste. It’s all in a school-day’s work in Stonewall Gardens at Stonewall Jackson Elementary School on […]
What fun to attend a tomato tasting party! Vivian Reiss’s annual tomato tasting is held on her city rooftop garden in August. She grows 57 different kinds of heirlooms and sliced them up for visitors to taste the booty, and I was lucky to attend. Deciding on the best ones isn’t as easy as you’d […]
Where do you go when you’ve used all the space in your garden and in front of your house? You take it to the office and up the elevator. Gardener and artist Vivian Reiss has transformed two spaces in her office building on Merton Street into garden paradises in the middle of the urban jungle. […]