In the Weeds
Lead, cadmium, phthalates, and other nasty chemicals may be lurking in your garden. But they might not have arrived there through fertilizers, pesticides, and pollution. Your own gardening tools could be the culprit.
A recent study, conducted by the Ecology Center based in Ann Arbor, Michigan, checked 179 common garden gadgets (newly purchased garden gloves, hoses, kneeling pads,...
This garden season, I'm planning to introduce you to new cookbooks (and their authors) that embrace eating homegrown foods.
To kick things off, meet Alana Chernila, author of the new cookbook The Homemade Pantry. Alana is a writer, cook, gardener, mother, and a passionate advocate of the homemade over the industrially produced. (Full disclosure: I’m lucky that Alana is also my friend, and I’m thrilled that...
The Home of the Whopper is going cage-free (at least when it comes to bacon and eggs). The Los Angeles Times and NPR gave Burger King shout-outs yesterday for promising to phase out all pork produced from animals housed in gestation crates (see above) by 2017. The chain will also stop serving eggs laid by caged...
A landscape architect/vegetable-growing guru/mad scientist friend of mine raises a huge garden in his front yard every year. This guy has pretty decent planet-loving bona fides: he raises chickens, grows without chemicals, and runs both his landscaping truck and his car on biodiesel. So I was surprised when he insisted that his secret to a hugely productive vegetable plot is ... plastic.
That's right, black plastic, and lots of it. It may look ugly as sin, he admits, but he credits it with allowing his crops to flourish and keeping weeds at bay.
...
I stop just shy of being a full-on paranoiac when it comes to industrially-produced meat. As I’ve written here before, I avoid fast food. My kids, to their great irritation, are banned from eating hamburgers in restaurants that serve industrial meat. We used to keep chickens for eggs, but after the foxes and hawks picked them off, we switched to a local, cage-free producer. I buy most of the meat we consume at home from...
Despite this March’s absurd weather -- summertime temperatures, a good hard frost, and raging winds all in the span of a few days -- it is not really spring. In the garden, green garlic has shot up, and I’ve sown some spinach, but it won’t feel like the garden's really awake until the first asparagus spears poke through the topsoil. When those purply-green tips finally appear, it’s proof, I suppose, of all the miracles taking place underground and the bounty to come.
I take an odd pride in my garden’s tiny planting of asparagus, given that now, four years after planting,...
Spring announces itself in my northeastern hamlet with a chorus of wild voices. My pond’s spring peepers have yet to start singing for prospective mates, but a flock of goldfinches encircled our tallest front-yard elm this morning, and I heard the first woodpecker of the season tapping in the woods. Bugs, mostly flies and gnats, are starting to hum, too, but the insect I most want to see, the honeybee, is still hiding out. And even when they emerge for the spring, bees may be elusive: though I seem to have a solid population of bumblebees, I rarely see honeybees in my garden....
Though it's barely above freezing in my garden this morning, I'm teetering on the brink of getting my hands dirty for the first time this season. Thankfully, the task I have in mind can be done indoors.
In the past, I have avoided starting my own seeds, preferring to leave that tedious task to experts. But why pay $3.50 or more for a seedling when, for the same price, I could start hundreds of my own? Sure, I'm risking disappointment (see the brilliant growers at ...
The IFC sketch-comedy show Portlandia once featured a scene embarrassingly familiar to those of us trying to eat local and sustainable food. The show's star hipsters (played by Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein) grill their restaurant server about the origins of the chicken they're contemplating ordering. Even after examining its dossier -- and learning that Colin (the chicken) ate local hazelnuts and sheep's milk...
"Are you crying?" my 10-year-old son asked, horrified, as we watched the film together for the second time. No, not a film, exactly. More like a commercial. A fast food commercial.
In my defense, a lot of people had an emotional reaction to the two-minute spot for Chipotle Mexican Grill, the Denver-based "fast-casual" burrito chain. The company's first-ever national TV ad aired during Sunday night's Grammy telecast. Produced last year, it's titled "Back to the Start" and features a roly-poly...
