I feel blessed living in the Northeast after Sandy as we only lost power for a week without major damage. Over 100 feet of fence did come toppling down but half of it was rotted and needed to be replaced anyway. So for the last few weeks I have been in storm clean-up mode like […]

One of the more delicious harvests are berries. My wife claims that I must have been a bear in a prior life as I devour anything with berry added to it. For us the berry season starts with strawberries during the first week of June. Strawberries have always been spotty as they require almost perfect […]

Even to those hearty New Englanders who are renowned for shrugging off a foot or two of snow, this winter has been trying. With nary a day during the month of January above freezing, the icicles are over 10 feet long hanging like formidable spears ready to impale a passer by. But there are few […]

I think it was dumb luck rather than prescience but last summer my wife and I decided to take a cottage in the Florida Keys for a month starting in February. By mid-January we were packed and ready to leave as the winter this year has been particularly brutal with its high winds and cold […]

One of the challenges in the discipline of horticultural therapy is that it is not well-understood or promoted. Googling  “horticultural therapy” gets you 60,600 hits compared with over 9 million for Paris Hilton. So I was pleasantly surprised this morning when I read two stories in the New York Times that dealt with the healing […]

Yesterday’s Thanksgiving feast that was held at many homes throughout the United States is often assumed to be all about turkey (and overeating.) My family went on the Turkey Trot held by the local Boys & Girls club in the early morning. The New York Times and our local paper recently ran articles about how […]

One of the anachronisms that I have enjoyed over the years has been a local farm that worked on the honor system. The Hickories is a lovely farm now run by Dina and Rob who sell a wide variety of veg and fruit at their farm stand as well as through a Community Support Agriculture […]