This is the navel-gazing section where I ponder gardening beyond the how-to and sometimes go off-topic entirely.
It’s a big week over here as my new book, “Grow Great Grub: Organic Food from Small Spaces” (I’m already an expert at saying the title super fast) hits bookstores TODAY! Except that we spotted it at a Chapters/Indigo here in Toronto last night. If you pre-ordered a copy, it should be arriving any day …
I just read a fascinating piece via the Telegraph UK that is absolutely blowing my mind. Researchers at the Royal Botanical Gardens Kew have conducted a study looking into plant behavior, specifically carnivorous plants, and are concluding that there are hundreds more carnivorous plants out there in the world than previously realized. Many of which …
A sad mess of dessicated branches soon to meet the compost bin is all that remains of my beloved ‘Chinese Ornamental’ hot pepper plant. I had grown fond of this little hot pepper plant and was sad to let it go. I started the plant from seed two years and lovingly nurtured it through the …
I’ve been tagged for a meme. I don’t typically do memes and i know this makes me a terrible meme not doer, but I swear my reasons aren’t bitchy, just awkward. For example, this current meme requires that I list seven random things about myself. Dear god, the pressure! On the one hand, I do …
I am doing something big this winter, something I have wanted to do for a very long time. It has sat inside me for years and years as a wish that I never quite believed would happen. Even now, with some of the plane tickets booked, I can barely believe I am really doing this …
I wrote this piece back in February for The Guardian UK, and am now posting it here in its entirety as promised. You can read my preface to it here. —————— My gardener’s story is atypical. There were no childhood summers frolicking in the garden of a rosy-cheeked matriarch eager to pass on a passion …
Over the weekend, I decided to read Jamaica Kincaid’s “The Autobiography of My Mother” for the second time. Opening the first page, I notice a note scrawled into the top right hand corner in my own handwriting, “pg 143.” Turning to page 143 I find the following passage underlined: “He had an obsessive interest in …
On Saturday afternoon Mary and Joan (and Davin, of course) came by and helped us clean up hundreds of cigarette butts, several broken bottles, the bamboo fence we built two seasons ago that had been literally and purposefully kicked in inch-by-inch along its entire length, a bag full of miscellaneous garbage, concrete dust left by …
Phew, that was fast. I put the finishing touches on an article late last night and it is already up on the Guardian website. This one, about the relationship between myself and my maternal grandmother is a bit more personal than usual and I am still getting used to having put it out there. However, …
I listened to this essay about the importance of physical labor by urban gardener Mary Seton Corboy yesterday morning on the This I Believe program and thought it was so brilliant I had to share. Listening to her talk about digging ditches made me want to run outside and dig something… except that it is …
Hello. Hi. Is this thing on? I’m experiencing a bit of stage fright, sitting here staring at the screen. It’s been so long since I’ve been here. Not here as in sitting at this computer staring at the screen. I’ve been to that “here” TOO much over the last few months. No I mean here, …
Over the weekend I stuck my head out of my hermit den long enough to notice that winter is coming. All of the signs are there, I’ve just been pretending not to see them. The first and most obvious being that it is cold. We haven’t turned on the heat yet but it’s getting there. …