It is fall, and there are a lot of things to put into the compost bin.  At my school garden a hard frost hit two nights ago, and while it made parsley leaves stand out in exquisite relief…       it also turned the dahlias to mush (but they were oh, so beautiful in […]

Our September storms brought record rains and an early end to summer.  Tomatoes swelled, cracked and rotted on the vine.  Basil browned as if burned.  Chickweed sensed wintry weather and began its carpet caper, but thankfully October arrived and said, “Now you just hold it right there.  These people need some more sun, lest they think winter […]

Well, now we don’t have to worry about how we’re going to root prune this thing next spring! Though we’d probably all like to think of ourselves as record breakers, there’s little comfort in breaking weather records.  Portland put one into the books this month as we closed September off with over 6 inches of […]

Whoever said something had to be complicated to be useful never got his or her hands on a dibbler.  This most basic garden tool, really just a souped-up stick sharpened to a point, fulfills an indispensable role for certain garden planting chores.  The catalogs advertise it as a bulb-planting implement, but I like it much […]

Way back when at the beginning of the year, I wrote a post about pre-nuclear potatoes, the latest thing in spuds.  These things, at least by name alone, seemed potent, exotic, perhaps even dangerous.  I was hooked, if not only by the name then by the promise of huge, mutant-like yields (without radioactive exposure!).  I got […]

It’s that wild and whacky time of the year in the garden when certain characters, like the cilantro I’m profiling here, are not just doing double duty, not just a triumvirate of power in the garden, but a veritable quadrilateral of usefulness to us on the rooftop and down below in the kitchen.First let’s start […]

Many of you may be thinking that I’ve gone bonkers and am having Baby-Jesus-in-the-manger hallucinations in the mid-summer’s heat.  No such thing.  Today we hauled up ten bales of straw to the rooftop to prepare for the Rot’s new regal inhabitant Stropharia rugosoannulata, the King Stropharia mushroom.  Straw bales await their ascent through the […]

  Let’s face it.  Every gardener and farmer worth his or her salt will readily acknowledge that as growers we’re only as good as our tools, which is also why almost every gardener and farmer that I know is also a tool geek/freak.  So “Tool Drool” is going to be my occasional subsection of the […]

  Just look at this beautiful basil. Those little pom-poms of Spicy Bush are just so darn cute I want to rub the tops of them every time I see them, just like I can’t resist rubbing the head of a kid who just got his summer buzz cut.  In past years we’ve had a […]

  Last week marked the second time this season I’ve spotted a katydid up on the rooftop, though never before in the 7 years of the Noble Rot rooftop garden’s lifespan.  I always love to log a new creature in any of the gardens where I work because to me it’s an encouraging sign of greater ecological complexity.  […]