North Country Reflections

Gardens are built on the past. In large part, the garden we enjoy today is determined by what we did months or even years ago. And likewise: what we do in the garden today sets the table for the garden of the tomorrow. With this in mind I would like to suggest that: Late fall [...]

Always a vegetable garden Everywhere I have lived I have made a vegetable garden …typically rectangular and sized to match whatever space was both sunny and near the house. The vegetables were delicious, but I always craved more. So when we moved to Vermont I decided the old potato field to the south of the [...]

Freshly picked raspberries in October?? Just as the garden is shutting down for the season, along comes this truly delicious treat for the fruit-lover. I have a dense row (some twenty feet long and three feet wide) of ‘ever-bearing raspberries’…the offspring of half a dozen plants given to me some four years ago as a [...]

Yesterday, I was just starting the ritual fall clean up of the veggie garden, when…surprise…surprise… I noticed my rhubarb plants still had great looking leaves. I know that any day now they will succumb to a hard frost, and the plants have no more need of photosynthesis this year. So I quickly harvested every last [...]

“Autumn, the year’s last, loveliest smile” William Cullen Bryant (1794 – 1878)   One day in early September a friend remarked “Well, I suppose your garden is all gone by now”. Not at all!!  While the exuberance of summer may be past,  in its own way the garden in autumn is every bit as lovely. [...]