On Gardening

On New Year’s Day five years ago, I planted a handful of seeds gathered from a Paulownia tree that survived the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Japan, fifty years before. The seeds were given to me by…

I am a steadfast refugee from the computer age, a modern dinosaur, born too late and disinclined to type, send e-mail, or surf the Net. I know that in the time it would take me to…

As a front-line organic gardener allergic to pesticides of any stripe, I have ample opportunity to practice Integrated Pest Management (IPM) in our huge, teeming garden. Lately, as clouds of pests and beneficial organisms descend onto…

Both my parents died at the end of 1998, each of them on a Monday, a little less than three months apart. Although they had been divorced for forty years, they flared out together like two…

I have a new spade this winter, heavy, a little stiff, and very sharp. As I work digging a fresh bed for Bleu de Solaize leeks, I think of my friend Agaja’s twenty-year-old spade. Agaja is…

“Draw your chair close to the precipice and I’ll tell you a story.”—F. Scott Fitzgerald I recently returned from a pilgrimage into Headwaters Forest in Humboldt County in northern California, where eight of us buried an…