Musings on horticultural therapy and the soothing effects of plants and nature
Working at Green Chimneys is full of paradoxes. One of the biggest ones that I don’t understand is the rationale behind the rule that staff are not allowed to discuss the entire life cycle of animals, particularly when they die. On a farm, life and death is common. Animals get sick and die, chickens that […]
January in New England does not bring to mind gardening, except to those die-hards impatiently waiting for the first hard melt. These frosty days January is a time where we fanaticize about gardens to come stimulated by the appearance of seed and gardening catalogues in the mail box. For us, it’s Christmas in January with […]
With over three feet of snow in less than a week, there is little time to think about gardening. My wife and I are from the school that likes to make many small trips outside to incrementally shovel rather than waiting for all the snow to fall so that it must be removed in one […]
We have had the most spectacular autumn in memory. Even to a color-blind boy such as myself the shades of the season have been alarming in their density and variety. Perhaps one of the best things about moving to Connecticut from Long Island is the superior colors of autumn. Long Island has great farms, beaches […]
The advent of autumn has always been bittersweet as the seasonal burst of a multifaceted patina of foliage is counterbalanced by the sad brown and gray death of its aftermath. I was in between these worlds this weekend as the first of a weekly raking regime started. I’ve always enjoyed raking as it is a […]
For a variety of reasons, I wasn’t able to spend that much time this summer at Green Chimneys so it’s been good to return on a regular basis and work with a new crop of children. Of my old charges, only one is a repeat, which is bittersweet as I miss my former students while […]
I was not a good blogger in August opting to rest and harvest my labors rather than write about them. For every post I did not write, I harvested a huge crop of something. First it was zucchinis, which grow in quick succession. My wife hated them as I pulled at least two a day […]
As I ranted before, I had a disagreement with one of our friendly groundhogs. He thought it was fine to eat through my gate and garden whereas I thought differently. There was no way to stop it from entering my grounds because for every hole I filled with rocks and dirt, another was dug. Unless […]
Each time I place either a seed or a plant into the ground, it is with the hope that something wonderful will happen. Or at the very least I will get a response in the affirmative. For me seeds continue to be a mystery as when you plant a plant (rather than a seed) all […]
“What?! They got the whole shipment. l want that son-of-a-bitch dead! We’re trying to locate… What am l, alone in this world? Did l ask you what you’re tryin’ to do? l want you to get this %$#@ where he breathes! l want Eliot Ness dead! l want his family dead, his house burnt to […]