Musings on horticultural therapy and the soothing effects of plants and nature
Today, the girls spent the morning working and pulling fruits and vegetables from the garden. The blueberries have perhaps one more harvest left but the blackberries have come in strong with many more on the way. Their tiny fingers are much more adept at picking berries than are mine. Charlotte is more partial to blueberries […]
With a few hot and rainy days behind us, the blueberry bushes are bursting with ripe fruit. Charlotte and Olivia are keen to help me (and themselves) and Juana harvest this new bounty. It’s early in the morning and there is still a little shade on the bushes. We want to get the picking done […]
Arriving home after a long trip, there is lots to do in the garden. Luckily I have my two granddaughters, Charlotte and Olivia, to help me out. The first thing we do is to harvest the snap peas and beans. Juana tried to keep up with the harvest, but there were too many plants growing […]
After a cool and cloudy May, June has exploded with growth and harvests. For most of May, asparagus, greens and rhubarb were the only things we were pulling from the grounds. But with a shot of heat, rain, and sun, my other plants are catching up. The most anticipated (at least among my grandchildren) is […]
It’s another year where we will start serving up Spring salads from the garden. I had pre-seeded both cold frames last Fall. Both had been doing well though December delivering delicious salad greens. But by mid-January a combination of extended temperatures in the teens and a rodent invasion basically stopped the harvests. Leaving for Florida, […]
In New England, you never feel that Winter has arrived until it snows. Cold is always expected but until the brown and gray ground is covered with the first blanket of clean, white snow, Winter is just a date on the calendar. A layer of snow on the ground is proof that the temperature is […]
Every day I look out toward the garden, I see little change. All of the plants and the grounds seem suspended in time. The growing season is over and the napping season has begun. The dominant color is brown, with the occasional sound of a dried-up leaf scraping against the patio slates, pushed by the […]
It is slim pickings in the vegetable garden. After a few frosts we have a couple of crops left: sorrel, herbs, leeks, greens and radishes. The greens will last through Christmas, hopefully, but the radishes are fewer in number. Juana asked me to pull a couple the other day for a dish she was preparing. […]
One of the last things I remove from the garden in Fall are asparagus leaves. They look more like ferns but that would be to confuse them with their ornamental relative. They tower over the neighboring rhubarb and strawberry plants in one of my many perennial beds. This morning in the early sun, they glisten […]
The first frost is expected in the next few days. With that event, more leaves will fall and the tender perennials with shrivel. But some of the plants I tend come into their own as others fade with the season. This year’s Japanese beautyberry is the most spectacular of the group as its long, pendulous […]