garden

I almost got my wish. A few weeks ago, I was jonesing for mojitos at midnight in Miami (even the alliteration is compelling) and suddenly there I was, stumbling down Fort Lauderdale’s seedy Beach Boulevard at 2 p.m. on a Thursday, mildly irritated by the gray sky and wind and prospect of a storm. For […]

Difficult, thorny, seemingly impossible pruning jobs don’t happen by accident. You have to really be dedicated to neglecting your garden in order for it to get so overgrown that you’re afraid to even approach it. I have been just this dedicated to my raspberry and blackberry bushes, and now I have the scars to prove […]

I’ve lived in Humboldt County for seven years, and it’s taken me all this time to adopt the standard Lost Coast response to the question, “What do you do?” Where I come from — and this basically applies to anywhere south of Garberville, north of Orick or east of Willow Creek — everybody has an […]

I realized recently that I don’t write nearly enough about vegetable gardening. The reason for this is simple: I don’t have one. I understand very little about what’s happening in my own garden, so how could I be expected to have anything at all to say about what’s not happening in my garden? But in […]

We gardeners are not — I repeat, not— difficult to buy for. The only thing you need to know is that the items you see advertised as gifts for gardeners — floral-printed oven mitts, silver trowel-and-spade earrings, CDs of peaceful bird songs — are actually not gardening gifts at all. They are gifts with a […]

It was a perfect day to be in the garden. There had been just enough rain to make the ground damp and easy to dig, but not enough to turn it to mud. More rain was on its way, but not right away. Time to start transplanting. I’ve been working on this gradual transformation of […]

There has been a lot of bug action at my house lately. On warm nights, the chorus of crickets from the front yard is loud enough to get a little embarrassing. If I go outside and walk up and down the street, it becomes obvious that the entire cricket scene is happening at my house […]

So there you are, wandering around the garden center, feeling like you are wasting your time because the garden is so overgrown that there’s not room to plant anything anyway. Back home, there are weeds to be pulled and the last of the summer vegetables to be harvested. The season has come to an end […]

By the time you read this, the winter solstice will be over and the days will be getting gradually and imperceptibly longer. That’s fine with me. Having a few minutes of daylight and a few degrees of warmth snatched away from me day by day has left me feeling irritated and impoverished. I should be […]

I’ll do just about anything to make a bee happy. I’ve filled my garden with asters and sedum and whatever else the bees seem interested in. I let leaf cutter bees carve tiny holes in my rosebushes and fly off unsteadily with a bit of green clutched between their legs. (I think they use the […]

Last month, I was in New York and I stopped by my publisher’s office to have a chat with my editor. While we were talking, my editor’s boss walked in and told me that she would be in Northern California in September. I asked her if she would like to stop by while she was […]

A couple of weeks ago, I took the long way home from the Bay Area and drove through Mendocino. Before I left, I made an appointment to visit Digging Dog Nursery, source of all good things in the universe. Well, my universe, anyway. I have been a Digging Dog junkie for years. I keep their […]