Saturday, February 8, 2025

News and Ideas Worth Sharing

Garden

THE LAZY BERKSHIRE GARDENER: Week of February 6, 2025

Take photos and review what you do from year to year to learn more about your landscape. That record will make it easier to make pruning, planting, and pest-prevention decisions in the future.

NATURE’S TURN: Winter’s sweet good-bye

“A sap-run is the sweet good-bye of winter. It is the fruit of the equal marriage of the sun and frost.” -- John Burroughs, in Signs and Seasons, 1886

NATURE’S TURN: Seeding our gardens, caring for the earth

"To grow healthy food requires a vibrant diversity of plants, animals and soil life. These form the immune system of your land that together help each other to sustain the farm. The soil we work with as part of a farm organism needs our help to be healthy.” -- Lia Babitch, seed garden manager at Turtle Tree Seed

NATURE’S TURN: Halfway to spring; Wild and domestic pleasures

Forcing plants to awake from winter dormancy well before their season is a wonderful experiment at home and in educational settings.

NATURE’S TURN: Garden to table: Good keepers

In planning the garden my emphasis is on staple crops that store without any preparation and fit into the existing storage “infrastructure.” Additional priorities include planting produce that is expensive to purchase in winter or not available organically grown.

NATURE’S TURN: Winter garden 

In the first of her biweekly columns about growing and gardening in the Berkshires, Judy Isacoff writes: "Stars, the sunlit moon and planets circle the expanse of frozen, fertile ground during these long nights. There’s the sense of a night shift at work underground."