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Watering Your Parsley Plants
Watering parsley can be one of the trickiest parts of maintaining your parsley plants in a healthy state. Like all plants, parsley needs water—but too much water can damage the …
the compost
Composting During Coronavirus
Back when my oldest, Zach, now 11, was just a toddler, I decided I wanted to compost. At the time, we were living in Naperville, Illinois. Every weekend Zach and …
Secret Ingredient Sweet Potatoes
Nobody in the county was better at coaxing food out of the ground than Daddy. He had the thumb, they said. Daddy had a lot of sayings. The old ones, …
Our Dog-Gone Garden
Old Compost Breath has been laid to rest. We buried our sightless Border Collie—in keeping with his nature—at the foot of the garden, just ten feet away from his beloved …
Snowed Peas
Boy—I’m showing my age with the classic duo in that headline, eh? Hey, kids—go ask your parents (please God, don’t make them have to go ask their grandparents, oh please, …
The Amaryllis and the Pussycat
It’s early December and I’m out driving when some folks at my public radio station call me with a Big Idea: Let’s send poinsettias to five stations that are on …
Planting Irises
“About six inches,” my mother replies. She and I are in the country, about two hours north of San Francisco. It is winter and we’re planting iris bulbs for the …
The Seven Years Beer
The python slips shoulder-first out of the bromeliads. (I know, snakes don’t have shoulders, but it leads with the bit of itself that would be one.) I leap backwards—and my …
Life-Changing Magic
Who wouldn’t want a little life-changing magic? That is probably why the catchily titled The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying by Marie Kondo spent over nine months on the “New York …
Chicken Tomatoes
I love to grow tomatoes. There’s nothing like home-canned sauce, so each year I grow at least 30 tomato plants. For a number of years, I also raised chickens so …
