Pokeweed: Patience is a Virtue
Pokeweed berries are high-quality nutrition for cardinals, mockingbirds, catbirds, phoebes, mourning doves, cedar waxwings, etc. A big pokeweed like this could really make a difference for bird life.
Read MoreBee Balm, Year Two
Last summer I decided to attempt a thing I rarely do–garden. For a person who is obsessed with plants, I have the very antithesis of a green thumb. If my family had to live on the proceeds of my vegetable garden, we’d all lose a lot of weight. This year I have harvested to date exactly eleven string beans, a summer squash, and one tomato the size (and taste) of a golf ball. I’m the only person I know who can kill zucchini. It’s no better in the flower garden. I routinely murder rose bushes, assassinate peonies, and cause tulips and begonias to commit suicide. This is...
Read MoreBee Balm: A Good Bet
I admit it. It’s an addiction. The first step is admitting it, right? Much as I love nature and wild things, I just can’t pass up a greenhouse. There’s something about all those plants, spread out in a wild crazy quilt of color. The sheer gorgeousness of the exotic blooms. This is Gade Farm on Route 20 in Guilderland. I park the car and walk inside, vowing not to buy one more plant. Usually, in twenty minutes I’m staggering back to my car loaded down with petunias or what-have-you. But this year I drifted away from the magenta and purple and scarlet of the annuals, and checked out the...
Read MoreGreat Ideas: The High Line
A great idea. An idea with potential to really change things, to create something new, to make the world a better place. I have them all the time. And then I think, ah well, that’s all a bit too much like work, really, for right now. I’ll get back to it later, for sure… In New York City, in the 1930s, an elevated railroad track was built to connect the docks, factories and warehouses that used to line the west side of Manhattan. But as the years went by, the trains stopped running, and the track was abandoned. It rusted for years, as grass grew between the rails. It was a...
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