Daily Hampshire Gazette Logo

Search Results

All these search terms are true at the same time:

Keyword search: gardening


Get Growing: UMass calendar brings another reckoning
11-15-2024 9:34 AM

The 2025 UMass Garden Calendar comes out every fall, just as we are putting our gardens to bed for the winter. As always, the calendar is a must-have for gardeners. It gives daily tips on indoor and outdoor gardening and other related subjects,...

Displaying articles 1 to 20 out of 24 total.
|<
1
2
>|

Get Growing with Mickey Rathbun: Appreciating the aster: The cheerful, abundant flowers will persist until hard frosts set in
10-11-2024 10:03 AM

By MICKEY RATHBUN

Many gardens go drab this time of year after summer flowers have faded away. But in fields and along roadsides, swaths of native asters add explosions of color to the transitioning landscape, with their golden centered, star-shaped flowers ranging...


Valley Bounty: Beans are her thing: Five years in, Heather McCann of Rustic Outlook Farm has launched her own bean club
10-04-2024 2:30 PM

By JACOB NELSON

When Heather McCann founded her farm, Rustic Outlook, in 2020, she picked a niche that few local farmers have chosen. She decided to make beans her thing.Dry beans, specifically. They’re a pantry staple that lasts for years and a delicious part of...


Get Growing with Mickey Rathbun: Time for a garden makeover: Seek help from professionals to see the big picture
09-13-2024 2:11 PM

By MICKEY RATHBUN

Late summer isn’t a pretty time in the garden, at least not in my garden. The recent mini-drought has bleached out what passes for lawn, several large hydrangeas are drooping as they beg me for water, the daylily borders are shriveled and brown....


Get Growing with Mickey Rathbun: You say tomato: A brief history of the fruit (or vegetable)
08-09-2024 12:36 PM

By MICKEY RATHBUN

It’s August and in my household that means one thing: local tomatoes. For much of the year, our grocery stores offer tomatoes tough enough to endure machine picking followed by days or weeks in cold storage. Even the more expensive, so-called...


Get Growing with Mickey Rathbun: A plant that’s sure to turn heads: Acanthus plants inspired classical Greek architecture
07-18-2024 11:57 AM

By MICKEY RATHBUN

Anyone with a passing knowledge of art history is familiar with the acanthus plant, whether they know it or not. The acanthus leaf, broad and serrated, is the decorative motif on the capital of the classical Corinthian column, more ornate than the...


Valley Bounty: From seed to vase: At Passalongs Farm and Florist in Florence, Adrienne Bashista grows and designs custom floral arrangements
06-21-2024 10:32 AM

By JACOB NELSON

“In a different life, I think I would have been an artist from the beginning,” says Adrienne Bashista, owner of Passalongs Farm and Florist. “I wasn’t forbidden from a career in art, it just didn’t occur to me. But now in my 50s, I’ve realized what I...


Get Growing with Mickey Rathbun: ‘This is my playground’: Saturday’s Northampton Garden Tour grants access to six beautiful home gardens
06-07-2024 12:38 PM

By MICKEY RATHBUN

I recently heard about a practice called Forest Bathing, which involves spending a few hours in a forest, or at least a sheltered patch of trees, and allowing one’s awareness to settle on all the immediate sensory surroundings. Forest Bathing is...


Get Growing with Mickey Rathbun: Venture beyond your garden walls: Plant sales and noteworthy gardens to visit this season
05-10-2024 2:56 PM

By MICKEY RATHBUN

After long weeks of yearning for gardening weather, we’re suddenly inundated by spring. Endless outdoor chores beg for our attention — composting, mulching, edging, scrubbing birdbaths and, at least in my garden beds, pulling out multitudes of maple...


An artist with a green thumb: The creative vision and resilience of Kathleen Chapman, designer of Tuesday Market poster
05-09-2024 3:20 PM

By PAT JAMES

Kathleen Chapman (“KC”) and I met under a clothesline near her patchwork garden behind McDonald House in downtown Northampton. I wanted to learn more about her artwork, what brought her to Northampton, and how she connected with Grow Food Northampton...


Valley Bounty: Your soil will thank you: As garden season gets underway, Whately farm provides ‘black gold’ to many
04-19-2024 11:13 AM

By JACOB NELSON

“Compost is not soil, but it makes your soil better,” says Mike Mahar, owner of Bear Path Compost in Whately. “It adds life to it. If you’re going to take something out of the soil by harvesting, you should put something back in, and compost is...


Get Growing with Mickey Rathbun: Become an educated gardener: Three upcoming symposia will answer all your gardening questions
03-08-2024 9:51 AM

By MICKEY RATHBUN

Most of us humans assume that other creatures experience the world through their senses of sound, taste, smell and touch, the same way we do. But we couldn’t be more wrong, as science writer Ed Yong explains in his fascinating new book, “An Immense...


Greening our brains and our thumbs: The many opportunities in the Valley to increase your garden knowledge and skills
02-29-2024 2:22 PM

By PAT JAMES

After moving from the city into a rural home with land 25 years ago, I was excited that the property was mostly bare ground that I could bend to my will and create beautiful gardens over time. As a kid, I’d helped in the garden a lot, so how hard...


Get Growing with Mickey Rathbun: A garden is a canvas: “Painting the Modern Garden: From Monet to Matisse” comes to Amherst Cinema
02-08-2024 1:35 PM

By MICKEY RATHBUN

As the calendar page flips to the short but cruel month of February, I suspect that many gardeners, like me, are getting tired of the somber palette of gray and brown.Just in time to rescue us from seasonal ennui, a wonderful documentary, “Painting...


Get Growing with Mickey Rathbun: Thoughts of the garden in winter: Gardening has its discouraging moments, yet we persevere
01-12-2024 12:13 PM

By MICKEY RATHBUN

There’s not a lot going on in my garden, now blanketed under a foot of snow, to inspire this month’s column. So I took a break from dreaming over the spring promise of seed catalogs and went in search of a soul-satisfying poem about the garden in...


Get Growing with Mickey Rathbun: The importance of talking to plants
01-13-2023 4:26 PM

By MICKEY RATHBUN

A few years ago I was having coffee with my two sisters-in-law at a family gathering in North Carolina. Both of them had recently built new houses and were quizzing me about how to create gardens in the bare dirt surrounding their homes. The question...


Shutesbury designer brings vision and long view to laying out greenspace
09-09-2021 5:05 PM

By MICKEY RATHBUN

SHUTESBURY — Many of us find ourselves puzzling over what to do with a bare yard, or an outdoor space that doesn’t quite work, or even an established garden that has gone “meh.” We want to make a change, but we’re stuck. We might have too many ideas,...


Ask a Local Master Gardener: To rake or not to rake?
10-24-2019 1:00 PM

By PRISCILLA TOUHEY

Q: My husband and I are “discussing” when we should rake up the leaves in our yard — after they are all down (him) or as soon as the lawn is covered (me). Help! Any thoughts on a solution? —C.J., NorthamptonA: We New Englanders love our vibrant red,...


Get Growing: Why crabapple trees are looking sad this year, and what to do about it
10-18-2019 2:15 PM

By MICKEY RATHBUN

Crabapple trees are one of my favorite ornamental spring trees. A mainstay of the New England landscape, they offer three seasons of interest, plus a handsome branching habit that looks good all winter long, especially when decked with freshly fallen...


Get Growing: Beware the tawny daylily
08-09-2019 12:04 AM

By MICKEY RATHBUN

I have a big patch of daylilies behind my house. They are a disorganized jumble of plants that were given to me along with others that I’ve bought at plant sales, nurseries and farmers markets. I have never paid much attention to this part of the...


Ask a (local) master gardener: Native groundcovers for sun and shade
08-02-2019 12:02 AM

By PRISCILLA TOUHEY

Q: I have a ton of vinca growing under my trees and would like to start replacing it this fall with native groundcovers. Any suggestions of good options? –R.M., Hatfield A: I am so glad you asked, R.M.! Vinca minor (Periwinkle) does fit the...

Displaying articles 1 to 20 out of 24 total.
|<
1
2
>|

Weather page

By using this site, you agree with our use of cookies to personalize your experience, measure ads and monitor how our site works to improve it for our users

Copyright © 2016 to 2024 by H.S. Gere & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.