In the Garden

Like any industrious squirrel, I am getting food stored and ready for winter. Even if your vegetable garden is depleted, you can buy things in bulk from your local farm stand now to save for winter.

After decades of improving my garden soil, I have an infestation of Asian jumping worms. They can eat all the organic material in the soil, depleting it terribly. These foreign invaders multiply more quickly than our common worms, out-competing them.

Monarchs are on the move! It is time for their long trip to Mexico to spend the winter. And like marathon runners, they need to bulk up on calories before the event.

While vacationing recently on the Maine coast, I admired many nice gardens. Many of them had hedges or fences, more than I am used to seeing in rural New Hampshire.

Most gardeners do some composting. Some folks compost anything that once was part of a living plant, often mixing it with barnyard waste; they turn and aerate their piles and make terrific compost in record time. Others are lazy composters who just throw kitchen scraps or weeds in a pile and let it slowly decompose over time, allowing it to gradually decompose.

As I walked around the garden recently with my wife, Cindy Heath, she turned to me and said “Anybody whose gardens looks great at this time of year deserves a medal.”

I recently visited the Nasami Farm in Whately, Mass. This is the plant production facility for the Native Plants Trust, formerly the New England Wildflower Society.

I recently visited Bedrock Gardens in Lee, N.H., and came away feeling refreshed and enlightened.

I’ve always been a gardener, or at least as far back as I can remember. More recently, say the last 20 years or so, I’ve been a plant collector.

Recently I was at my local food coop and chatted with a friend about her gardens. She told me that she is having fabulous luck growing tomatoes, peppers and more in a bucket system she constructed.

Since ancient times, explorers have brought back seeds and plants from exotic lands.