making romesco sauce and more, with deborah madison

One of the biggest (i.e. most expensive) commitments that comes with designing your interior is flooring. While it’s easy enough to test out colors on your walls, installing or refinishing floors is a much more time- and money-consuming project—so it’s basically crucial to get right the first time around. Hardwood and engineered wood floors, along with LVP (luxury plank vinyl), are still the top choices among most homeowners, but wall-to-wall carpeting is growing in popularity—and it’s getting a full rebrand.

South Carolina’s thousands of dams are used to establish ponds, lakes, and reservoirs that provide flood management, hydropower, drinking or irrigation water, recreation, and wildlife habitat. For many of us, the dam that helps form our backyard fishing pond supports Saturday afternoon fishing with the kids. To protect the integrity of your dam and the benefits of your pond to you as the pond owner (like that trophy bass habitat!), you should plan to perform regular inspection and maintenance of your dam.

ONE OF THE FIRST FRUITS that Josh Kilmer-Purcell and Brent Ridge planted when they took ownership of historic Beekman 1802 farm in Sharon Springs, New York: gooseberries.  Now the city-turned-country pair are having a bumper gooseberry year—and Josh joined me on the radio to talk about that and other aspects of “The Heirloom Life,” the subject of the duo’s breakfast slide lecture in my town August 17 to help celebrate my next garden Open Day. I’ve pre-ordered a couple of copies of the “Beekman 1802 Heirloom Dessert Cookbook” (due out in September) to share with some lucky winners, so read on for a chance to win–and some gooseberry lore, recipes and more.

SO MANY GREEN BEANS, so little time. That’s how I always feel around now: how to keep up with the glut of one of my favorite vegetables. I don’t like them canned (all olive green and overcooked!) and they can lose crunch or get ice-encrusted when blanched and frozen plain, so I put mine up in canning jars in the freezer, doused in homemade tomato sauce. Read how I freeze green beans and many more garden-fresh goodies.

Like all of Ken’s 18 books (!!!), “Making More Plants: The Science, Art and Joy of Propagation” is rich in instruction, but also visually arresting, since he’s an award-winning photographer, too.  It covers the botany of propagation—the why’s behind how you can make more plants of a particular species sexually or asexually or both—because as Ken says:“It is not essential to learn about botany to garden well; it’s inevitable.”Then in words and intimate pictures he covers virtually every tactic for doing so, from seed-sowing to leaf and root cuttings, to layering, grafting, division and more.  The photos are so beautiful, and Ken’s obvious enthusiasm so evident on every page, that I want to try everything. (Just what I nee

I make about eight batches of red sauce late summer until frost, stashing it in the freezer for a year of enjoyment.  It isn’t much prep work, at least not the way I cook. Each “batch” constitutes a spaghetti potful of fresh, raw ingredients before it cooks down to less than half that, enough for 5 or 6 freezer containers of 12-16 ounces each. If you’ve got that last glut of tomatoes in need of processing, or see a bargain bushel of seconds at the farmstand, this lazy-person’s recipe for red sauce might be just the thing.Again, I don’t take the time to peel or seed the tomatoes (to you purists, mea culpa; I’m a whole-food type…and also a bit manic when I cook). The sauce is the tiniest bit more bitter, perhaps, but think of all that fiber (and time saved).Lazy Woman’s Tomato SauceIngredients Enough paste-type or other tomatoes to fill a spaghetti pot 1 head garlic Extra virgin olive oil Fresh basil Fresh parsley, preferably Italian flat-leaf Salt and pepper to taste; small amount of sugar optionalWash tomatoes and cut off stem ends and any blemishes

IN OUR CHAT on my public-radio program, I learned why not to till when prepping a planting; how to help a desired species outpace an unwanted one by learning to manage and influence natural processes; and what the word “naturalistic” means today.what’s ‘naturalistic,’ anyway?Q. How did the native and natural become your specialty, Larry—did the education in landscape design come first, or the nature and science?A. My first experience in the landscape world was working in traditional horticulture—first a job, and then going to school for it. However my interest in it always came from the naturalistic end.As a kid, I grew up in the urban Philadelphia and I don’t think I even knew there was such as thing as a garden designer, until I got a job with a landscape firm, in the summer between high school and college.But the thing that always interested me was na

“If you know the basic science and a few techniques with home dairy,” says Alana, author of “The Homemade Pantry: 101 Foods You Can Stop Buying and Start Making” (Amazon affiliate link), “the whole world opens up and you can make a zillion different things.”That first book has been lavished with praise from food stars including Mollie Katzen, and Alana just delivered the manuscript for “The Homemade Kitchen,” due out in fall 2015. She’s a keen gardener whose grow-your-own passion and cookbook writing both began in 2008 with a job selling vegetables in our local farmer’s m

EVERYONE’S COME HOME FOR THE WINTER and there isn’t much navigating space in some rooms here–sound familiar? If there were a few more tender plants to accommodate, I’d need to build an addition, to overwinter them all. Until Andre the doodler pointed out the parallel with this weekly doodle, I didn’t know about the show “Hoarders,” oh my oh my.

Research from the nearby Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, New York, reveals how acorns initiate a complex series of ecological chain reactions. And not just the obvious ways, like feeding turkeys or chipmunks or deer, but in influencing Gypsy moth outbreaks and tick-borne disease risk, and even the reproductive success of ground-nesting songbirds.Dr. Rick Ostfeld, a disease ecologist from Cary Institute, helped me understand what–both seen and unseen–is going on with those tiny acorns and their mighty, wide-ranging influences. Read along as you listen to the Oct. 19, 2015 edition of my public-radio show and podcast using the player below. You can subscribe to all future editions on iTunes or Stitcher (and browse my archive of podcasts here).my q&a on acorns’

On my public-radio show, Arboretum director Mark Weathington took me through the years-long process of “discovering” new plants. Plus, Mark highlighted some Arboretum specialties that may belong in your garden, including standout redbuds and mahonias, and the lesser-known evergreen shrub Illicium, and even showy native dogwoods selected to withstand increasingly saline soils in tricky coastal areas.What’s now called the J.C. Raulston Arboretum at North Carolina State University is where I met my first Cephalotaxus–a near-lookalike to our common evergreen yews but excitingly deer-resistant. And then a moment later I met another one–this time a columnar form–an

Confession: Despite all my years at “Martha Stewart Living,” Gayla is far more adventurous in making things than I am. We both cook, and can, like mad—but she goes further. After purchasing a small copper still, Gayla spent her summer making hydrosols (floral waters—such as rose water), and just bought a set of wood-carving tools to try her hand at spoons and other implements. Impressive.And she can sew—to make the oversized muslin packets for herbed bath “tea” bags, for instance. (My last attempt, in junior high school sewing class, resulted in the project becoming stitched to the lap of my dress.  The bell rang before I realized what I’d done, so I had to wear it, like a lopsided fabric collage, to my next class. Nice.)GAYLA’S RELATIONSHIP to the garden so intimate that every bit of it seems to make its way into the rest of her life, and into the lives of lucky friends who are recipients of her many giftable goodies, such as:Bundles of twiggy herbs fr