Originally published in the Northern Agrarian.
When I write about gardening I sometimes, without meaning to, give the impression that I wake every morning to survey a vast domain of neatly tilled beds and a refrigerator bursting with home-grown produce. In fact we have very little space. We own an acre and a quarter, but nearly [...]

Originally published in The Northern Agrarian, May 2008.
When I was young my parents tended a small garden: Peas, tomatoes, lettuce, parsley, zucchini, beets. All this in the small backyard of a small house in a medium-sized northern town, sheltered from a major highway by a cinder-block laundromat. My mother pickled beets, canned apple butter and [...]

The cherry tomatoes, undeterred equally by months of drought and by the torrential rains that followed, still bear more fruit than we can eat. Planted two to a pot and having long since outgrown their stakes, they intertwine with their neighbors for mutual support and have strength to spare for the morning [...]

With the exception of a few tomatoes and some basil, we have given up on the garden this year. The drought is simply too severe, and the raised beds were taking more water than they are worth.
But professional farmers with drip irrigation systems are surviving, if not thriving, and we have been eating well [...]

On a trip to Pennsylvania in late June I bought the finishing touch for our duck pen: a hex sign. It bears an eight-point star and rosette, for fertility, surrounded by raindrops. The fertility wishes, needless to say, are for the ducks. The rain is for all of us, and dear lord do [...]

It has not rained for four full weeks. We are barely able to keep enough water on the garden, but the big raised bed is going strong. The cabbage and broccoil have yielded several meals, and we have pulled out the spent pea plants and planted cucumbers at the base of their trellis. (Well, "trellis" [...]

This month we took the big leap into livestock with six Khaki Campbell ducks. (Well—seven Khaki Campbell ducks. We got a bonus duckling from the hatchery. We ordered six females, and I’m sure we have six females, but even if we assume the seventh to be male—which he probably is, because males of laying breeds [...]

We planted the tomatoes, peppers, and cucumbers last weekend. The raised beds don’t get enough sun to make tomatoes really happy, so we moved them last year to pots along the fence at the bottom of our driveway. That worked just fine so long as we remembered to water them, but the raised beds need [...]

By the middle of March around here it is already spring. At the equinox the daffodils are waning and the hyacinths are in full bloom. The spring crops are coming on strong; we have already had a salad or two. The dogs, oblivious to the flowers and to any vegetables they can’t reach to nibble [...]

In the Chinese Calendar, the New Year, which arrives four to eight weeks after the winter solstice, marks the beginning of spring. (That’s late January to mid Feburary for you Westerners.) That makes sense to us, because in North Carolina, it’s time to plant potatoes, lettuce, greens, onions, peas, and cabbages and their kin. We [...]