Martha Stewart

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Martha Stewart is the queen of many things: cooking, baking, decorating, aging with style, being best friends with Snoop Dogg, and, of course, gardening. She has written books on gardening and consistently notes that April is a great month for getting to work on your vegetable garden.

Jay Wilde

Your spring decor is about to be gorgeous—and super on trend, thanks to this list we coveted from Google.

BASIL DISASTER? I always enjoy Adrian Higgins’s pieces in The Washington Post, though I suppose enjoy isn’t the right word for a story about how a fungal disease is making basil harder to cultivate successfully. Downy mildew—not a new affliction in greenhouses and gardens, but newish to basil in particular—is on the march. Get the details in this great story.A WEED BY ANY OTHER NAME? A couple of weeks ago, esteemed senior research scientist Peter Del Tredici of the Arnold Arboretum was interviewed in The Boston Globe, and shared his view

I first met Deb Perelman in my former life, when I worked for Martha Stewart. It was late 2007 or early 2008—a millennium ago in internet years—and we’d invited in a group of bloggers we admired to get better acquainted.  Deb sat to my left (and beyond her was Heidi Swanson of 101Cookbooks.com, with the founders of Apartment Therapy and theKitchn.com across the table, and more). I think that gathering is what crystallized my intention to start a website: such an inspiring group.But I digress. If you haven’t visited Smitten Kitchen, prepare to be entertained, educated, and called to action.DEB PERELMAN is a self-taught home cook, and is funny in that self-deprecating way I love (often using the cross-out strikethrough key on her editing dashboard to good effect). On the blog, and in the new cookbook, Deb invites you into her kitchen, and family, teaching you (her Tips section online alone is worth a visit, let alone all her recipes) while tempting you. You always come away hungry…until you get out the ingredients

M AY IS MADNESS. I have already said that in the monthly chores column. But it’s madness otherwise, too: garden tours to prep for; workshops I’m giving with friends; a garden contest I’m judging (as in, free prizes!); a sister in the news to brag about…and oh, I need your help with the Urgent Garden Question Forums here, too.

NO, THAT’S NOT A PHOTO FROM YEARS AGO. That was Wednesday of this week, when I traveled back in time to see my friend Martha Stewart, and tape two segments for her Friday, February 25 show.

The way I cook is all about big potsful of things, and freezing or canning for later: cook once, eat multiple times. For the price of 1 pound of dry beans and a few simple ingredients, the yield is enough for six or eight portions, most of which are frozen in small containers for later use.This easy recipe takes very little active prep, but lots of waiting on each end for soaking and then baking. We gardeners are patient types, no?baked-bean tips and tricksDon’t want to pre-cook the beans? Soak them for 24 hours, changing water several times, and plan to bake them longer, perhaps all day. No good tomatoes in winter? I avoid needing to use canned by freezing a few bags of whole paste types at harvest time (above) for just this

First, a disclaimer, since my old-style journalistic policy is not to accept samples of garden products or plants, even for my giveaways, and because I almost never write about a product:I got my first length of this particular hose when it was a prototype, in an inadvertent swap with the man developing it. Jeff Thomas of Water Right Inc. emailed me when I left my job and started A Way to Garden; he’d heard I was consulting, and wondered if I might be free to help with something. We met, and though we never did work together, that morning I swapped some of my ideas for a bagel, tea—and a piece of the most unusual-looking garden hose I’d ever seen.I know more than the av

The 2013 PDN catalog celebrates “a quarter century of delightful plants”—meaning proprietor Tony Avent and I got into the business at the same time. Happy silver anniversary to both of us (remember, I told you all about my 25th the other day?).I love that Tony saw to it that I was clustered on the bottom right of his new cover with Ken Druse, who I think introduced me to Dan Hinkley decades ago, and nearby to Martha Stewart, whom I introduced to Dan when I went to work for her in 1994ish. The illustration makes me remember many good times with those three and various people pictured: pa

I paid a visit this summer to historic Beekman 1802, the rural residence of my ex-Martha Stewart colleague Brent Ridge and his partner Josh Kilmer-Purcell, also known as “The Fabulous Beekman Boys” from the Planet Green reality show and from the popular memoir “The Bucolic Plague” that Josh published last year about their city-to-country transition.For the Beekman Boys’ latest project (do theyever stop?), the cookbook team included another old friend, Sandy Gluck, former food editor of Martha’s “Everyday Food” magazine and one of the smartest cooks I know. The result: a happy combination of fresh-from-the-garden ingredients, including many heirlooms, that Brent and Josh grow at their Sharon Springs, New York, farm or purchase nearby, combined into well-written, practical recipes that invite me to try them. No crazy-long lists of ingredients; no daunting step-by-steps, thank you.

All Things Plants: It was our mutual friend Dan Long of Brushwood Nursery (gardenvines.com) who introduced us, and I am so grateful to know All Things Plants’ founder Dave Whitinger. He’s in Texas and I’m not—but the common threads we always find when we get together spell kindred spirit. I was the guest on his popular podcast this week (do you subscribe already?). Beekman 1802 Boys: One half of “The Amazing Race”-winning, goat-farming, cheese-making Beekman 1802 Boys was my colleague at Martha Stewart, and we keep in touch across the rural New York State counties betw

A Garden for the House: Kevin Jacobs’s literal “garden for the house” is not far from me, just across the county we both live in. And it’s here, on his blog. (He’s giving away books this week!)Martha Moments: I’ve known Toronto-based blogger Andrew Ritchie since my Martha Stewart days. No surprise, since his site is called Martha Moments, and I had a f

I HAD A DAYLONG ADVENTURE back to New York City recently, when Debbie Millman, chair of the School of Visual Arts’ master’s program in Branding and creator of the podcast show “Design Matters,” invited me to her studio to record. Though Millman is still very much in the thick of it—not a dropout gardener by any means!—she’d read my recent book, and wanted to talk about a range of things from my history as a serial college dropout, to my love of gardening, my days at Martha Stewart, the importance of stillness—and what my Girl Scout sash still means to me.

Dr. Tripp, the voice of Robin Hood Radio’s newest program, “Your Health,” received her D.O. from the University of New England. In previous incarnations she has her BS and MS from Cornell; her Ph.D. from North Carolina State University, where she also served as Curator of Conifers for the famed J.C. Raulston Arboretum, and did postdoctoral work at the Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University. She knows from trees and shrubs—and that’s what we talked about:q&a: great trees for gardens, with kim trippQ.What woody plants always got your recommendation—what did you try to encourage clients to plant when you were making gardens for people, while supporting yourself through medical school? A. The first thing I always did, especially with a new client, was to walk around with them and say, “Let’s just see what’s growing here now–what’s out there and doing well,” and have a look at it and see if we like it or don’t. And we’d go from there.I found a few plants in our region that no matter what the conditions, were always doing well—even with deer browse.They were thi

I REMEMBER SITTING in our skyscraper-high offices at Martha Stewart, dreaming out loud together about the “someday” of rural living. Well, I made it out of the city, and so did Brent Ridge—my former colleague, and half of  “The Amazing Race”-winning duo called the Fabulous Beekman Boys. Now he and Josh Kilmer-Purcell are coming over to this side of the Hudson River for my August 17 Garden Conservancy Open Day, and to do a talk about “The Heirloom Life” they live.

I WANT TO SHARE a secret about how to make a garden, and also a secret about myself, I guess. The secret is music. More than 25 years ago, when I first bought my then-weekend place, there was no garden here. Every Friday, I’d arrive full of youthful energy to do battle with multiflora rose, wild raspberries, barberry and spiny thistles. Besides my loppers and saw, I’d grab one of my best garden-making tools from the glove-box of the car: Al Green.

I love clafoutis (kla-foo-tee), a humble French concoction that’s like a Huffy-Puffy or Dutch Baby or German pancake–whatever you call it, that’s my favorite Christmas-morning food. But the clafoutis is sweeter and has fruit inside. If you have 3 cups of fruit and some kitchen basics like milk and eggs and flour, you can make this dessert very last-minute, even just as you sit down to eat the main course, another selling factor. Easy, yet quite impressive.Though clafoutis is traditionally made with cherries, as it was in the recipe Martha shared in her must-have 1995 cookbook, “The Martha Stewart Cookbook: Collected Recipes for Every Day” (affiliate link), I’ve come to regard her batter as the universal solvent for all things fruit.With it, I have since made clafoutis from peaches, plums, pears, various berries, cherries, and mixes of fresh fruit and dried (such as by adding a handful of dried cranberries or cherries to pears

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In the well-to-do town of Bedford, New York, there are a few givens: there are apple orchards and quaint bed and breakfasts, cute bakeries and amazing antiques shops and, of course, many grand estates complete with rolling green lawns and well-hedged gardens. Perhaps most impressive of the latter belongs to the doyenne of the domestic, Martha Stewart.

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