Determining whether a plant is a weed is a subjective thing. Most gardeners define them as plants that just happen to be in the wrong place. But there’s another layer […]
Farm & Garden
What would it look like to grow, harvest, and protect our bounty?
Browse all Farm & Garden stories below or dive into a topic:
POSIES
When a Farmer Favors Flowers
Paula Erickson builds summer bouquets in her Truro garden
Paula Erickson walks among delicate dots of yellow, purple, and white. She is searching for something with a touch of wildness to complete her bouquet. Rows of sweet pea, foxgloves, […]
ON THE LANDSCAPE
In Summer’s Slow Nightfall, a Glimmer of a Reward
Lessons in letting nature keep the schedule
I should have known the chickens would not go into their coop until it was properly dusk. I had stopped in at my mom’s place to shut the chickens in […]
QUAHOG REPORT
For Clam Growers, It’s Planting Time
As this year’s harvest is devoured, shellfish farmers look two years out
For most clam lovers, the labor involved in enjoying the bivalves is about as rigorous as scooping them baked and stuffed out of their shells, or perhaps balancing them, along […]
GARDENER’S NOTEBOOK
Structure and Color for Every Season of the Year
In Eastham, a collection of maples and conifers grows little by little
Story and drawings by Abraham Storer Keri Thomas and David Smile’s garden comes as a surprise to a visitor arriving on Oak Ridge Road in Eastham, not far from Cooks […]
SEASIDE GARDENER
An Earthbound Rainbow
Bearded irises can bedazzle any Cape Cod garden
I was looking at an iris the other day, watching a bee tumble and bumble its way through the folds, ripples, and petals, drunk with pollen-dusted happiness, and I thought: […]
THE PEOPLE’S PERENNIALS
A Not-So-Secret Garden Is Blooming Again
Local green thumbs complete a 3-year restoration of Suzanne’s Garden
Suzanne Sinaiko never wanted a vegetable garden in the plot near her East End home. “My mother said to me right at the beginning, ‘Look, I can get vegetables at […]
ON THE LANDSCAPE
Remembering That Last Bobwhite’s Song
After a meditation, listening differently for the peepers and the bees
When I think back to my childhood here, I remember days spent in the woods and fields and on the marshes and the dune tops. The memories have an enchanted […]
LITTLE THINGS
An Artist in the Garden
Tessera C. Knowles plants an invitation to slow down and look closer
In Tessera C. Knowles’s painting Saltine at Egg’s Isle, Provincetown’s drag mistress of political satire sits in a chair on the sand behind the Julie Heller Gallery surrounded by an […]
GARDENER’S NOTEBOOK
A Hillside in Bloom
Reed Boland cultivates a kind of wildness
Story and drawings by Abraham Storer If you’ve ever driven up Bradford Street in Provincetown, you’ve likely seen Reed Boland’s garden — or part of it. The tiered landscape stretches […]
FLOW STATE
Gardens That Make Runoff a Resource
How fanya chini and Hügelkultur inform Peter Jensen’s Cape Cod permagardens
ORLEANS — Agroecologist Peter Jensen placed a hose along the road above the Church of the Holy Spirit and turned it on. The water flowed into a dirty channel between […]
ON THE LANDSCAPE
How the Beach Draws Us Back
Over and over again, the chance to see something no one has ever seen before
Something about the beach felt different that morning. The feeling was quiet but persistent — a background sound humming below louder thoughts. I’d walked an eighth of a mile before […]
ORCHIDELIRIUM
The Patient Practice of Growing Orchids
Christine and Alan Hight will wait for their epiphytes to bloom
There is one orchid in Christine and Alan Hight’s house in Wellfleet, a Cattleya or corsage orchid, that took 10 years to bloom. Each year, it would “spike” — a […]
BITTER ABOUT IT
Salad, Sort Of
While the wild plant community is still slowly waking up from winter dormancy, there’s one urbanite who’s wide awake, in full flower, and ready to be flung on your dinner […]
SUNNY SIDE UP
Of Avian SAD Lamps and the Hunt for Winter Eggs
As the days grow longer, local hens are laying again
Like rosebuds, like leaves, like most living things, in the absence of sunlight, hens’ eggs do not bloom. In the depths of winter, a farm-fresh egg seems like the perfect […]
