There is no universal fix to help all of our challenges, but one instrument the state has given towns to sustain and stabilize their full-time population is the residential tax exemption.
I have been richly rewarded as gardener and artist for sowing winter wheat – which requires warm soil – as soon as beds were prepared after onion harvests and, especially fascinating, the rye that followed cucurbits and beans.
As you prepare for succession planting and look ahead to new growing spaces, please consider that creating and maintaining permanent planting beds is the starting point for recognizing soil as an ecosystem of micro- and macro-organisms.
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."
