Star of the trellis show at Noble Rot, it’s Tromboncino, the Italian summer squash that is absolutely unrepentant about its unrestrained vining habit. A few years ago I had a vision. The vision was of walking under an overhanging trellis dripping with vegetables and of the vegetables being laughably easy to harvest. Slight effort to […]
Poppies and Emmer
To combat the brutal heat we’ve been getting day in and day out this summer, I’ve been showing up at the Noble Rot rooftop much more around sunrise and sunset to water, plant, and….photograph. Of course we all know how magic the light is at that time, and I am pleased to share this picture of […]
A Straw Bale Garden Awakening…and a few BOOMS!
Ye olde humble staw bale….once the province of the barnyard animals, but now shifting toward housing and gardening uses. Some years ago I used to walk past a construction site in my neighborhood where, after the work was completed, a couple straw bales got left behind on the neighboring empty lot. I eyed those bales […]
Exciting, new rooftop introduction
Part of my job, so it seems to me, is to be a novelty agent on the Noble Rot rooftop garden. Sometimes that involves being an agent provocateur as I slyly disregard my chef’s wishes and plant what I think should be planted, and sometimes it is merely being an agent of change, a scourer […]
No More Tomato Cages!
I’m not sure why I do it. Every year, for some reason or another, I wind up using those flimsy, conical tomato cages as supports for my tomato plants, and every year, by mid-season, I am cursing the floppy, insubstantial things, swearing I won’t set another one in the ground ever again. You know what they look like: […]
Potting Up Peppers
It’s a feverish time of the season, when seedings from weeks past wash up on the shores of this week as young plants needing to be transplanted to larger pots. Plus there’s still this week’s seeding to do, plants to be planted out-of-doors, weeding, harvesting, and then the rest of life….hence the fever. While certain crops like lettuce fairly […]
Green Garlic Triumph
[metaslider id=52]There are a few achievements in life that I remember with a satisfaction disproportionate to the actual mastery shown. Typing is one. I skipped typing class in high school, pecked my way with two fingers through my college thesis, then decided that I was never going to do that again. I sat at my parents’ […]
New Take on the Potato Tower I
Here’s a nugget ‘o wisdom I gleaned from the NW Flower and Garden Show last weekend in Seattle courtesy of Danielle Sherry, senior editor of Fine Gardening magazine. She presented on “Towering Tubers: Grow 20 Pounds of Spuds in Less than 4 Square Feet”, and I almost skipped it because of a preconceived notion […]
It’s SHOW-time! Bring on the Garden Shows of Late Winter!
If I could add a hyacinth scent button here so you would be utter overwhelmed with the smell of these multi-hued flowers, then you would be getting some sense of how the NW Flower and Garden Show creates a multi-sensory world where you can live and forget the rest of the world for a few […]
Eye Candy, Hand Heavy
Caution when opening. Once you go in, you’re not coming out for a long time. The first sentence of the Whole Seed Catalog says, “It’s hard to believe that this is our 18th seed catalog….” Perhaps that is hard for them, but it’s harder for me to believe that this catalog has been out there […]