Posts under ‘Books’

It occurred to me, as Carol at May Dreams Gardens was organizing the first meeting of the Garden Bloggers’ Book Club, that the winter is a perfect time to settle in with a good gardening book and learn something new. I’m going to go ahead and state for the record that this has not been [...]

Last night, Steve had already eaten dinner by the time I got home from my yoga class, so I nuked my food and settled down at the kitchen table with my copy of Teaming With Microbes: A Gardener’s Guide to the Soil Food Web, which is this month’s Garden Bloggers’ Book Club selection. (Note: I’m [...]

When I was a little kid, I remember eating bowl after bowl of cereal. I loved eating Cheerios with milk and sugar, and then, when the cereal was done, scraping the bottom of the bowl for milk-saturated sugar crystals. It was almost like breakfast and dessert, all in one bowl. During high school, my boyfriend [...]

The December selection for the Garden Bloggers’ Book Club is My Favorite Plant, edited by Jamaica Kinkaid. I had hoped to have more time to read this excellent anthology of writers ruminating on plants, but a busy and complicated December made me glad that this is a book one can dip in and out of, [...]

I’ve never gone back and added up what it cost us to put in and maintain the garden this year. It’s not like I’m going to do anything with that information, really, because I’m not someone who spends a whole lot of time budgeting. Why sit down and make a budget when there are other [...]

Carol over at May Dreams Gardens kicked off a Garden Bloggers’ Book Club this year, an opportunity for all of us in the garden blogging milieu (I have wanted to use that word for WEEKS…) to get our hands out of the dirt and into a good book. I support this concept, not just because [...]

Last night, Steve took me to the Lincoln Cafe in Mount Vernon, Iowa, for my birthday. I’d been dying to go there since my friend Amy sent me a copy of an article in the May 2004 issue of O Magazine profiling the chef and highlighting the restaurant. The food was fabulous, just as I’d [...]

In Virginia, squirrels are the ubiquitous yard rodent. We have squirrels in Iowa City, too, but more often than not, the daily visitors are rabbits, instead. Even before we planted a garden, they seemed to be everywhere. When I first moved here, I thought they were adorable. I’ve always had an affinity for rabbits, and [...]

Two days later, we arrived on Maggie and Heal’s front porch, ready to learn what we could, and planning to hit Paul’s Discount afterwards for bags of topsoil. Here is some of what I learned during our gardening lesson: We absolutely, positively, most certainly could not use a snow shovel to till our yard. We [...]

William Alexander qualifies as someone else who would do anything for a good tomato. I highly recommend taking a listen to the tale of Superchuck.