Books to Pickle

In my part of the world, harvest season is now in full swing and it’s demanding. Just picking and washing and storing nature’s bounty takes time, and the vegetables from my garden are so good and various that ambitious cooking is required just to live up to them. Adding canning on top of that? Not something I’d ever managed to do in 18 years of gardening. 

Read the last Garden Rant on prairie gardening.

Last year, however, the ridiculous bushels of cucumbers and squashes I produced prompted an unfamiliar impulse—pickle. To learn how, I ordered the ...

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Backyard Gardens on the Ecological Front Lines

Say hello to science writer Emma Marris. Her first book, Rambunctious Garden: Saving Nature in a Post-Wild World, covers a revolution in the field of ecology—an increasing awareness that the traditional goals of conservation are not only unachievable on a large scale but also too narrow. 

Read the last Garden Rant on the charm of chickens in Cluck.

Those goals largely focus on preserving pristine wildernesses by turning back the clock in them to an arbitrary “baseline” date before modern civilization, trailing exotic species, arrived at the door. However, given realities such as climate change, this frozen-in-time paradigm means ...

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Garden Rant: The Moral Fruit

If Matt’s Wild Cherry, one of the best tomato varieties in my garden, is a minor character in your book, I am automatically in.  

Sure enough, by page four of Barry Estabrook’s Tomatoland: How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit, I learned that the first domesticated tomato, which probably dates to the Mayans, “produced long, sprawling vines familiar to any home gardener who has tried to rein in the rampant, weedy growth of varieties like Matt’s Wild Cherry, a commonly available type much like the first tomatoes to be cultivated.” And when I first opened ...

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Garden Rant: The Aphorists

Read the last Garden Rant at Kirkus all about raising chickens.

So the gardening books that have really meant something to me in the long-term are not those written by people purporting to infallible horticultural expertise. The ones ...

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Garden Rant: The Self-Sufficient Urbanite

 As a vegetable gardener, I’ve just moved to the big city. For years, I had a pretty country garden of almost 2,000 square feet at a weekend house. But I grew weary of trying to force my family to the country when they wanted to spend their weekends where the action is.

Read the last Garden Rant on understanding garden design.

So I have just made a vegetable garden of about 800 square feet in my small city yard in Saratoga Springs, N.Y. I’m sure that by harvest season, this garden will be so beautiful, it ...

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Garden Rant: Cooking with Madhur Jaffrey

It’s a simple truth: Vegetable gardeners need great cookbooks. If you’re adventuresome in your planting, the most valuable thing in the world is a cookbook that can help you turn that into adventure on the plate. My favorites are the Indian cookbooks written by the Indian-born writer and actress Madhur Jaffrey. Many of Jaffrey’s dishes are delicious stews, yet the vegetables somehow remain brightly flavored within even highly spiced curries.

The taste of Jaffrey’s food is miraculously rich and garden-fresh at the same time. I spoke with Jaffrey in April and learned that for her, too ...

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Garden Rant: Graham Rice on transatlantic gardening, British music and his next book

Please say hello to Graham Rice, author of more than 20 gardening books, including the American Horticultural Society’s Encyclopedia of Perennials, one of the most frequented books in my gardening library. The encyclopedia is comprehensive, informative and lavishly illustrated, as you’d expect…but it’s also delightfully opinionated and fun, as you wouldn’t.

Read about more great gardening books at Kirkus.

The surprising amount of personality operating here is really no surprise, given that Graham, a transplanted Brit, also moonlights as a DJ for Radio Catskill. He describes his BritMix show as an eclectic blend of ...

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