Over the river...
My parents never went over the river and through the woods. I never went over the river and through the woods. My children didn't, and certainly my grandchildren have not. Nevertheless, the lyrics of the quintessential elementary school Thanksgiving song plays in our heads, the melody rings true in our minds. Thanksgiving…when we want to pause from our everyday lives…reflect on all that is

More fall chores
Just when I think I’ve seen the last of the days when I want to work in the yard, a day like today comes along and all I can think of is being outside in the fresh air. Although I’ve pretty much put the garden to bed – I can’t lift the dahlias until the first hard frost – a walk around the yard usually finds something that needs to be done. My Montauk daisy is in the corner flower garden. It

The last light of summer
Walking back from town this afternoon I could no longer delude myself. Winter, and its short, dark and cold days, really is just around the corner. And then a spot of bright pink caught my eye, a last dahlia, highlighted against my dark green hedge. I love dahlias. Of course, like every flower, they have their pluses and minuses, but for as long as this garden has existed they’ve elicited oohs

Cool weather, continued
Long before I pick the green tomatoes, I bring in all the houseplants that have spent the summer on my front porch, enjoying the rain and humidity of a Larchmont summer. It’s a several-step process: check for bugs, prune and repot if necessary, and then try to find a place in the house for those that have outgrown their original places. As sad as the process makes me – after all, it means the

Green Tomatoes
With the temperature dipping close to the freezing mark this week, I decided it really was time to finish cleaning up the garden. After all, what chance was there that those tomato plants, practically bare of leaves, were producing the energy needed to turn all those green tomatoes red? In all my years of growing tomatoes, never before did I have such a large stock of green ones left on the vine