I love the smell of parsnips in the afternoon

It smells like victory. At the end of the season last fall, I dug up about two dozen well-formed parsnips, almost six pounds worth. Also the usual tomato, eggplant, and chile pepper. This was the biggest surprise, as I had never had any luck before growing carrots or parsnips. But last winter, I had enough […]

Penultimate Harvest

A frost warning sent me out to my community garden plot yesterday to gather all the green tomatoes that were never going to get ripe. I picked a heavy bagful of tomatoes, a few from my Butter Bush, a lot from the Rutgers, plus four more huge tomatoes from a volunteer tomato plant in my […]

I grew some food!

Because of all the rain, it’s been about a week since I visited my community garden plot. I was startled by all the changes.

Don’t give up on lettuces

I went to water my community garden plot today. After a hot, dry weekend that I spent hiding in the freezing air conditioning at Readercon, I feared everything would be all crispy. Instead, the plants looked fine.

Compost fixes everything

Finally, finally one of my compost tumblers finished cooking the leaves and weeds, and finally I emptied it. So today I brought over a couple more bags of compost to my community garden plot, and the most important “finally” is that the whole plot has a layer of compost on it. The best part is […]

Our community garden has hawks!

The sky was grey when I visited my community garden plot today. It was still hot, but a bit of a relief from the blazing sun of the last three days. The wind rising provided more relief and a promise of thunderstorms later tonight. But I had a couple things to do before the rain […]

I don’t think I’ll be harvesting much lettuce

The plants in my community garden plot are kind of a mixed bag. On the plus side, the soil is a really good starting medium. I’ve got lots of tiny turnip sprouts and cilantro sprouts, and burgeoning daikon sprouts. I sowed some old parsnip and carrot seed, not expecting anything to come up (those are […]

Found some pollinators in the chives

Sunday was a beautiful sunny day to go visit the Pollinator plot at the community garden. The chives have been flowering for some days, and I was looking forward to seeing the bees. Sure enough, the chives were hosting a bee party.

Opening Day at Watertown Community Gardens Grove Street

Today we held the official opening ceremony for the community garden at Grove Street. As the people gathered, we milled about and admired each other’s plots.

Planted my garden plot today

Well, I’m finally recovered from NERAX, and plots are ready in the Watertown Community Garden, so today I went over to plant mine. Besides, Earth Day is a day to spend in the garden. Things are looking pretty spartan still at the community garden, and I had to circle around a few times to find […]