Late fall’s the time when straw bales abound, the castoffs of every Harvest Festival and Apple Tasting. While others are busy celebrating the harvest, the astute gardener still thinks about planting and celebrates that what others cast off can become an instant garden treasure. Drop bales in desired location. Add soil top. Plant. Yes, it’s […]
Author Archives: Marc Boucher-Colbert
Don’t Forget to Harvest Wisdom
The blogger’s current garden notebook. It’s actually a 2016 calendar which I got cheap by buying it in February. I can make entries on particular dates, which is good for noting things like plantings and the weather, and I can write long, rhapsodic reflections on the lined pages in the back. While you’re saucing […]
Gotta love those volunteers!
There’s barely an organinzation out there that doesn’t benefit from some good volunteers; you know, the folks who come in, ask little or nothing from you, roll up their sleeves, and get to work doing what you’d have to do yourself. Well, same goes in the garden, though here I’m not talking about the people. […]
Garlic Rust – A Fight to the Finish
This year I have decided to take on garlic rust, a very formidable foe that levelled my rooftop garlic crop completely last year. Funny thing about these diseases, they can have the most lyrical Latin names. Garlic rust is alternatively called Puccinia allii and Puccinia porri, either of which I could imagine coming off the lips of […]
Meet, greet, nosh, drink, tour, learn!
Annie Novak is one of the hot-shots of urban agriculture, and she’s written a great new book on a subject near and dear to my heart: rooftop agriculture. On Sunday, April 10th from 2-4 pm, if you happen to be in Portland, OR, you should make it your aim to come to Noble Rot, the restaurant where […]
Smashing Misconceptions
With this post I start a new occasional subline within the blog, similar to Tool Drool, this one about ideas or experiments that somehow remove a mental gardening barrier and open the way for innovation, which as a gardener may mean a longer season, earlier crops, a more bountiful way of growing an old favorite…you […]
Why I Love Chefs….Follow Up to the Edible Lawn
The other day I was discussing the edible lawn/Buckhorn Plantain with one of the Noble Rot chefs, and he was saying that the kitchen staff didn’t feel that the greens were as tasty this year as last, perhaps, he mused, for want of cold. I wondered back to him if they had tried them cooked, […]
A Temporary, Edible Lawn
What if rather than trying to get the weeds out of your lawn, you could make a lawn out of weeds. Well, wead on, dear weader, and you shall see how. Besides its well-known medicinal properties, the common weed Broadleaf Plantain (Plantago major) is a nutrient powerhouse, and thus gardeners everywhere should incline their eye […]
Little Gem Lettuces Race Out the Gate
Little Gems, meet your new view, the mid-winter Portland cityscape. Today, under winter’s cloudy skies, but reasonably warm nonetheless (snowless, too; sorry, NY, DC, etc), I planted lettuce starts on the rooftop…the very same that I started a mere 25 days ago in my January 1st ritual seeding to augur in a good new year. Normally […]
A Seed-Catalog Gardener’s Education
A friend and I were discussing the demerits of a college education the other night, railing on about the obscene tuition and the likelihood of getting a debt-weighted liberal arts degree only to pull coffee shots or sling pizza dough afterwards…that coupled with the irony that there has never been a an easier time to […]