book giveaway: alicia paulson’s magic garden

THE PATH TO FULLTIME LIFE IN THE GARDEN–to a little more peace than my former city corporate life included–keeps offering up unexpected extras, especially in the form of new friends. This week’s book giveaway–the biggest yet, with chances to win four copies of my upcoming book and four of “The Gift of an Ordinary Day” author Katrina Kenison’s, too–is a collaborative cross-blog effort with a kindred spirit that you won’t want to miss.

You can win one of two, three-book sets that I’ve purchased to share as prizes—no, not my old food-splattered copies, above, but new ones. Promise! All you have to do to have a chance in the truly random drawing (I’ll use the tool at random [dot] org to pick a winner) is comment below, and be a subscriber to my email newsletter. All the details are at the end of this post.Your comment should simply tell us what you like to put up for later from your garden or the farmer’s market—and it can be as simple as a sentence or include a recipe or a link to one; up to you.Tips and Tricks:Immediate ideas and tips on coping with the harvest can be had from these articles:What’s in My Freezer at Harvest Time: a Roundup of Ideas Making Pesto: Garlicky Green Ice Cubes Growing and Storing a Year of Parsley (good for many other green herbs, too) Dan Koshansky’s Hand-Me-Down Refrigerator Pickles Vegetable Curry-in-a-Hurry ‘Love Apple

Just jump in (down below in the comments) and tell me a tip, trick or insight you have to share about saving some kind of food for later use (or simply say hello; I’ll count your entry anyhow). Here’s mine:I’m using Mason or Ball jars for freezing this year, gradually phasing out most of my plastic food-storage containers. That’s a frozen test jar up top of my first 2010-vintage tomato sauce (popped out of the freezer for a moment for its portrait).Why this change?I keep reading more all the time about food and their reactions to contact with various plastics. Apparently “p

Last month’s giveaway, my first ever on the blog, was such a hit that I promised a monthly event (though in April we might just have a surprise “extra” edition, so stay tuned).  As a garden writer, it seems fitting that I should give away not just my own book (as I did last month, and promise to again) but also books by those who’ve taught me. I have been stockpiling some goodies from the used-book dealers the last few weeks.Crockett’s Victory Garden James Underwood Crockett (first published, 1977) The star of the PBS series “The Victory Garden” was also the author of a series of books on how to garden, and this is my favorite of his. It was my first garden book ever, given to me by my sister, so maybe that’s why, but I think its value far exceeds the sentiment attached. Dated (meaning chemic

Start with a cold-hardy cultivar if you plant to try to overwinter rosemary in the ground in other than a truly frost-free hardiness zone. ‘Arp’ is the best known, along with ‘Hill Hardy’ (also known as ‘Madalene Hill’ after the late herb gardener from Texas; ‘Arp’ was her discovery, by the way, the result of her search for plants that could take not extremes of cold but the Texas heat). Oregon-based Nichols Garden Nursery’s owner touts ‘Nichols Select’ as being a toughie, too.It’s “as hardy as any I’ve grown, probably Zone 6B, and the flavor is terrific,” Rose Marie Nichols McGee in an interview one spring. “It was planted 25 years ago at our home and survived minus-7 degrees F once. I think this is your best for a long-lived rosemary.”The U.S. National Arboretum website trialed many cultivars, and how they fare on all scores. Even in USDA Zone 7A,

The Deer’s Delicate Palate: We all wonder (often in loud expletives when something has been chewed) what it is that deer won’t eat. I loved this online tool created at Rutgers University Extension (based on observations in northern New Jersey) that rates things from “Rarely Damaged” to “Frequently Severely Damaged” (above) in a five-point scale that seems more sensible to me that saying anything’s “deerproof.” We could all benefit from this kind of thinking, a sort of risk-assessment philosophy of planting in the presence of these beasts. (You know me; I don’t. I gave up and got a deer fence.)Compost-Bin Envy: I have never met Ryan Boren, one of the lead developers (read: software engineer) for WordPress, the platform I so love and that this site is built on. Who knew that Boren is also adept with wood-working tools and built himself a composter-to-covet at the Texas home he shares with his growing family and some mighty cute goats. The “after” shot of his three-stage compost bin is here; the detail shots here.An Old Friend, Overplanted:

IN SOME THINGS lonerism backfires, like when the ladder needs steadying to get at the top of an errantly sprouting espalier, or a truckload of eight cubic yards of mulch is dumped by the far gate. Though ordering seeds is not heavy work, it is best not done alone, either; I have always had a companion for the task. My latest one, of considerable years’ duration, got it in his head to move to Oregon recently, for greener garden pastures, taking with him not just the in-person dimension of our friendship, but also access to the nearby greenhouse that was, of course, a perfect complement to the shopping we did together all that time.“I’ll buy the tomato seeds if you’ll grow them,” the conversation with Andrew would always begin, as if he needed my ten- or fifteen-dollar annual enticement, when of course we never really paid careful mind to who bought what or really kept a running tab of our years-long botanical barter. It hardly mattered; what counted was the chance to look together, to compare notes, to react collaboratively to the possibilities—ooh! aah! ugh!—and eventually to relish the harvest (or to commiserate when something was a flop and there was no harvest, or

WHEN I CALLED Rose Marie Nichols McGee after much more than a decade, it was like we’d just hung up moments before. “Do you still grow Phlomis?” she asked without missing a beat, referring to a mint relative I’d loved early on in my garden’s life, a former Nichols Garden Nursery purchase I’d almost forgotten (since I’d eventually killed it, oops). That’s OK, she said; it got tricky here, too. The nursery, with more than 60 years selling herbs and much more—one of the first places I ever shopped as a gardener—is Rose Marie and her husband, Keane’s, family business (that’s them above), and they’ve seen lots of plants come, and go, and come around again. With a gift-certificate giveaway and an herb-growing Q&A, meet an old friend and some great new and old plants as well–and learn tricks for growing them.

Out of the leaf litter they ascend.When I purchased this native of woodsy streambanks in northwestern California and southwestern Oregon for my New York garden, it was still called Peltiphyllum peltatum. I have a thing for big-leaved plants (likeAstilboides, its cousinRodgersia, and even thuggishPetasites). I had to tryDarmera, whose leaves can reach 18 in

If I count my blessings from 2009, I’d count Andre right up there, along with starting A Way to Garden (and now The Sister Project), getting a book contract of my own (more on that someday) and letting Jack the Demon Cat in the house to sit at my feet while I work each day.Andre’s memoir is brutal and charming and uproarious all at once, sharing as he does in his words (sometimes starting with “F”) and pictures (sometimes involving turgid body parts) the journey through life’s inconvenient truths and low tides, as the book depicts:A line drawing of a bucket labeled “Happy Pills” and beside it the caption “Hard to Swallow.”

Recent InterviewsRural Intelligence, the indispensable year-old blog that’s a guide to the tri-state area I live in, helped me celebrate my first blog-a-versary this week with a 20-questions meme-type interview. If you live nearby, or you’re planning a visit to this area (maybe to see my garden, details below), be sure to check in with RI first, and make a real day or weekend of it.A crafty tripleheader: I keep saying I’m not crafty, but throughout my career I’m always surrounded by crafters. Hmmm….Lately, I am grateful to a few new ones I think you’ll want to meet, including:Diane Gilleland, aka S

Each of her 150 recipes is delightfully prefaced with what amounts to its provenance: a juicy and sometimes hilarious back story that Clark tells in as simple yet deft a fashion as the style of the dish that follows. I sat right down to chapters like “Better Fried” and “It Tastes Like Chicken” and “My Mother’s Sandwich Theory of Life,” the perfect mix of a good read and a good meal.For me—a flavor-fearing kid who rinsed most of her entrees off at the sink conveniently positioned halfway between the Garland range and the family dinner table—Clark’s childhood tales are positively hair-raising: Summer vacations were spent touring France with her psychiatrist parents, gourmands determined to eat at every Michelin-starred restaurant there. Worse yet (or to Clark, more thrilling): Th