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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Prairie Gardening in ‘Sleep, Creep, Leap’

Benjamin Vogt is a poet, essayist, gardener and longtime Friend of Rant. His work has been nominated for Pushcart Prizes and has appeared in American Life in Poetry, the ISLE journal, Orion magazine, The Sun and on the website Verse Daily.

Read the last Garden Rant on 'The New American Landscape.'

Vogt’s Sleep, Creep, Leap is a memoir of three years in his 2,000-foot native prairie garden located in Lincoln, Neb. Like his other writing, it’s beautifully and thoughtfully crafted, and I’m pleased to see him apply his literary talents to gardening. I talked with Vogt ...

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The Dirty Truth in ‘The New American Landscape’

I feel like I’ve read every book published about “sustainable gardening”—surely there aren’t any more of them!—but I was still eager to read the latest from Timber Press because the contributors are the undisputed experts on their subjects, from soils and water conservation to native plants and permaculture. Indeed, the book’s subtitle, “Leading voices on the future of sustainable gardening,” is no idle boast.

Read the last Garden Rant on the great British gardener Anna Pavord.

So despite my imagined overexposure to this topic, I found plenty of interesting tidbits in The New American Landscape ...

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Being Anna Pavord

There can be great pleasure in reading gardening advice that has little or no practical relevance. That’s why we cherish the British garden writers. From Christopher Lloyd’s tropicals and perennials, to Graham Thomas’ roses, to Anna Pavord’s tulips, these titles remain the backbone of the literary gardening library. The fact that only a tiny area in the Pacific Northwest comes even vaguely close to equaling British conditions matters not a whit. American gardening anglophilia continues unabated.

Read the last Garden Rant at Kirkus on backyard gardens and the environment.

Why? It’s simple—the love of gardening ...

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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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The Charms of ‘Cluck’

Years ago, I very much wanted a piece of chicken art by S.V. Medaris, but I couldn’t afford it, so I bought a T-shirt instead. That T-shirt now has a hole in it, and some paint splattered on it, which is proof that I wore it endlessly. Sue (she goes by S.V., but her name is Sue) Medaris is an extraordinary painter and printmaker who has a way of capturing chickens in all their absurdity and charm.

Read the last Garden Rant column on Slow Gardening with Felder Rushing.

So imagine my excitement when Cluck: From Jungle ...

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Garden Rant: Slowing Down with Felder Rushing

Whatever Felder Rushing’s “slow gardening” is, I’m for it. Rushing, despite his actual horticulture degree, radio show, books and years on the speaking circuit, is also one of the few real characters in the gardening world. He stands out from the crowd not just by his distinctive look and Mississippi accent, but by ruffling feathers with statements like these:

•  “You don’t have to have your soil tested.”

•  “Green side up, that’s the big deal.”

•   Or on how to compost:  “1. Stop throwing that stuff away, and 2. Pile it up somewhere. There are whole books written ...

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Garden Rant: They shrunk the hostas!

Gardeners who have to deal with heavy soil, partial-to-full shade and aggressive tree roots know the value of hostas. They easily thrive under these difficult conditions to form a lush, rippling, green carpet, punctuated in midsummer by more or less attractive flowering spears. In my area of the world, I would say with confidence that hostas, daylilies and rudbeckias are among our top five go-to plants.

Read the last Garden Rant on Tomatoland.

And I imagine most gardeners know how many hostas are available. Hundreds. Maybe thousands. The temptation is to buy one of each—green with white stripes, blue ...

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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 Bad-Tempered Gardener’

There’s a lot of hand-wringing going on in the publishing world right now. The poor economy, the closure of many fine independent bookstores, the rise of e-books—it’s causing a lot of anguish. And there are some numbers to back up the anguish. Sales of all print books fell around 10 percent during the first six months of 2011, according to Nielsen BookScan.

Read the last Garden Rant on The Well-Tended Perennial Garden.

In the tiny insular world of garden writers, the anguish seems to swirl around the question of what sorts of books, exactly, publishers still want ...

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Garden Rant: Will 'The Well-Tended Perennial Garden' Go Digital?

When perennials became the hot plant group for American gardeners in the ‘90s, new perennial gardeners glommed onto Tracy DiSabato-Aust’s 1998 book The Well-Tended Perennial Garden because it so clearly explained how to grow the plants—it’s not for nothing that she’s called the Queen of Deadheading. Now in an expanded edition, the book has sold more than 184,000 copies, which makes it the bestselling title of all time for Timber Press.

Read the last Garden Rant at Kirkus on weeds.

So with book publishing awash in talk of new media, I asked DiSabato-Aust if there ...

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Garden Rant: Weeds, Weeds, Weeds

Weeds—where would we be without them? How you define weeds is intrinsically connected to how you define gardening. For someone whose garden consists of little more than a front lawn, a back lawn and maybe a shrubbery surrounding the house, a weed could be anything higher than grass level that does not flower.

Read the last Garden Rant on books about the gardening life.

For example, a perennial garden I helped install on behalf of my neighborhood association consisted of—among other plants—epimedium, brunnera, daylilies (hemerocallis), Russian sage (perovskia) and flowering bulbs. The owner of the empty lot ...

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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: All About Chickens

I am one of those crazy chicken owners who has more books about chickens than actual chickens. In fact, the ratio right now is three-to-one in favor of the books. 

Catch up on all your gardening with exclusive Garden Rant columns at Kirkus.

Chicken-raising is one of the most entertaining enterprises you might ever undertake, but it has its harrowing moments: fragile, day-old baby chicks and their weirdly specific temperature requirements (95 degrees, no more, no less, or you risk freezing or roasting them); young layers and the strange eggs they sometimes lay (double yolks, no shell, enormous eggs one ...

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Garden Rant: Weird and funky with ‘Chanticleer, a Pleasure Garden’

“Neither a museum nor a great plodding institution, Chanticleer is a gardener’s garden,” says Adrian Higgins about what he and garden photographer Rob Cardillo and this blogger and horticulturists all over the world call their favorite garden. And surely gardeners will be inspired by Higgins’ new guidebook, Chanticleer, a Pleasure Garden, to make their gardens better in at least some small way.

Read the last Garden Rant on Christopher Lloyd.

Now don’t let “guidebook” scare you off. Higgins is no hack—he’s the garden editor of the Washington Post, and he knows how to tell a story ...

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Garden Rant: Celebrating an unapologetic ornamentalist

For the past couple years, I’ve been fighting a feeling that I’m being left behind by the gardening world as part of a forgotten minority. The hottest trends have passed me by. I don’t grow food, I don’t raise chickens, I hide my compost bin, and I’ve never had a rain barrel. Don’t think there’s a powerful movement afoot? Here’s the opening line of Dominique Browning’s review of gardening books in the Sunday New York Times: “The garden book jury has returned a verdict. You are either growing vegetables or you ...

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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: A Conversation About ‘Understanding Garden Design’

What I know about garden design could not fill the rest of this page, much less a book. I’m an impulsive plant shopper; my garden is more like a closet stuffed with outfits I don't remember buying and will never wear. Some things work, some things don't, but trust me:  it is all chance.

Read the last Garden Rant on At Home with Madhur Jaffrey. 

But Genevieve Schmidt of North Coast Gardening is not only a garden designer, but a blogger and an avid reader. She's designed many beautiful gardens around town, and she's always ...

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Garden Rant: 5 Things I Love About 'Tomorrow's Garden'

After years of presenting America’s best gardens to magazine readers and writing about them for The New York Times, Stephen Orr finally found the time to compile the most interesting ones in his new book Tomorrow’s Garden. (Rodale Books, 2011.)

Read the last Garden Rant about gnomes.

While it’s true that what makes these gardens so interesting are the myriad ways that they exemplify sustainability, don’t worry because Orr avoids the usual lists of environmental do’s and don’ts and their accompanying finger-shaking, and relies instead on photos that lure and inspire us to create ...

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Garden Rant: Gnomes!

Are gnomes the new vampires and fairies the new witches? And where do zombies fit in? For the most part, I accept with resignation the abundant presence of supernatural creatures in the worlds of literature and pop culture. Personally, I’d rather be entertained by more-or-less real people doing more-or-less real things. But there is no question that the Harry Potter, Twilight, Wicked and LOTR franchises are huge, and drag a flotilla of lesser-known fantastic inventions behind them.

Read the last Garden Rant on Cooking with Madhur Jaffrey at Kirkus.

The gnome phenomenon is part of a strange assortment of ...

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