I hope you are enjoying your garden as Summer approaches. And I hope you’ll enjoy this splendid Summer issue of GreenPrints. When putting this issue together, I again realized just how special this magazine is.  READ MORE 

Walter Beineke: An organic gardener from West Lafayette, IN, Walter is a retired Purdue University forestry professor and book author. Barbara E. Brown: A retired teacher and librarian from Rockford, IL, Barbara also has three children’s books under her belt. John Eckenrode: A flower garden lover, former Cornell University psychology professor John has found a…  READ MORE 

I have gardened organically on the same plot in West Lafayette, Indiana, for almost 60 years. After all that time, I fancy myself a pretty good grower of tomatoes.  READ MORE 

Wherever I have lived, my green-thumbed neighbors grew gardens that I envied for their beauty and abundance. Me, my name is Brown—and, alas, my gardening thumb matches.  READ MORE 

I recruited my granddaughters to paint the sign. Sofi, the 10-year-old, was enthusiastic and started right away to take the paints from the cabinet. Bella, the 12-year-old, was skeptical.  READ MORE 

I am out for a walk in early June in Seattle when Anna, our neighbor on the corner, alerts me about her pears: “There’re going to be a lot of pears this year,” she says, aiming a stream of water from her garden hose at a rosebush.  READ MORE 

Do you have any fish heads?” I ask the woman behind the seafood counter.  READ MORE 

The Summer of 1955, I was 5 years old: impressionable, imaginative, and gullible to no end. Being the youngest child and only girl, I was a bit of a tomboy. I adored my older brothers. I depended on them for much of my childhood entertainment, companionship—and education.  READ MORE 

A lot of things simply don’t grow in Vermont. Magnolias, figs, azaleas, and avocados don’t have what is popularly known here as a snowball’s chance in hell. We’re devoid of coconut palms, papayas, and bananas, and the only oranges we can cultivate all by ourselves grow on those tiny little trees that grow indoors in pots—provided, that is, that the furnace doesn’t go off in January.  READ MORE 

The grand (or not so grand; your choice) illusion of GreenPrints is that we grizzled veterans are asked to write a seasonally appropriate story every quarter, months before that season actually appears. So, full disclosure: I am two-fingeredly pounding out this attempt at a Summertime story on March 20, the first day of Spring.  READ MORE 

I would hate to add up how many hours a gardener spends waiting for something to happen. But then, there’s a reward of some sort at the end of the wait—a crop, a bloom, a successful new plant.  READ MORE 

When I saw the bright and shiny Facebook ad that proclaimed “FREE MULCH—DELIVERED!” my heart almost skipped a beat. All too well, I remembered mulching my flowerbeds last Spring. It took many trips to the hardware store in my trusty blue minivan to buy enough bagged cypress mulch to get the job done  READ MORE 

Early in the 20th century, my great-grandfather purchased the Massachusetts house that years later I would grow up in. It was sited on a ledge of pretty pink rock that lay a few inches below the surface.  READ MORE 

I am a Southern organic gardener on the Louisiana Gulf Coast, near New Orleans. We plant early here, knowing that by mid-July, our tomato plants become shriveled, yellowing, bug-chewed masses of vines with little more to show for themselves. I started in mid-March, with successive plantings throughout the garden in April and May. By late May, my March tomato vines were seven feet tall and brimming with ripening fruit. By early June, the first crop had already been harvested with many more coming in to take their place.  READ MORE 

Gardening wasn’t really my family’s thing. My parents grew up in New York, my mother in Queens and my father in Brooklyn. Their idea of gardening was repainting the concrete slab in the back of the house green to look like grass.  READ MORE 

The sky is that piercing, heart-wrenching, soul-lifting blue found only on a clear Wisconsin Summer day—and walking in the clinic’s parking lot, I am keenly aware of the clarity of the world around us. Just ahead of me, my husband Ed’s parents, Harry and Grace, walk arm-inarm, while I stay discreetly behind, giving them a little space of their own. We have just been told by the doctor that Grace’s cancer is not operable. Treatment would be devastating and debilitating.  READ MORE 

Summertime has always meant sun, dirt, and mud to me. It means longer days. Most of all, Summertime means abundance.  READ MORE