recipes to help keep up with the csa share or garden’s bounty, with ali stafford

Amy Batog

Try these delicious flavoursome summer cocktail recipes to recreate Chelsea at home. We’ve even got the kids covered with a homemade elderflower cordial recipe just perfect for this time of year.

The fascinating garden at Knepp Castle in Sussex, home to ‘Wilding’ author Isabella Tree, reopens for the scheme this year. Credit: NGS 

This heirloom grain, together with the skilled knowledge and forced labor of West Africans and their descendants, made South Carolina very, very rich. From 1720 to the outbreak of the Civil War, rice was the most economically valuable crop for this state. White landowners, who thought rice would do well in the low country, themselves lacked practical knowledge of rice cultivation. Instead, they paid a premium to slave traders to capture and transport laborers from the well-established rice region of West Africa to Carolina. During the 18th century, many enslaved people brought into Charleston came from this rice-growing area. These people and their descendants created the Gullah-Geechee culture in the low country.

When Alexandra Stafford, author of the book “Bread Toast Crumbs” and creator of the website alexandracooks.com, has visited the podcast before in recent years, we’ve usually talked vegetable cookery or soups, because we’re both big soup-makers. But 2020 is no normal year. And so what the hell? Let’s bake.Plus: Comment in the box at the bottom of the page for a chance to win one of the books we’re featuring—all five will be given away here to five readers. Then head over to Ali’s website for a chance to win each book, too (details below).Read along as you listen to the November 30, 2020 edition of my public-radio show and podcast using the player below. You can subscribe to all future editions on Apple Podcasts (iTunes) or Spotify or Stitcher

Native bees species (like the mining bee above on the wildflower boneset) don’t get as much attention, and other insect pollinators even less, but without our wild pollinators we’d enjoy far less biodiversity, both in plants and animals—because they’re key to the food web, which would otherwise break down. To get to know some of these unsung heroes and the critical roles they play, I spoke with Heather Holm, author of the book “Pollinators of Native Plants,” which teaches us how to identify and attract and appreciate them in our gardens and beyond. (Enter to wi

THE FLYER PIQUED MY INTEREST: Dan Benarcik, part of the creative team at Chanticleer Garden in Wayne, Pennsylvania (a must visit!), would be lecturing nearby about “The Art & Craft of the Garden,” and how to personalize a garden using artistic elements, found artifacts, and ornamental containers. I quickly got a ticket—you can, too, for the June 16 event, including garden tours and a garden market, in Spencertown, New York—but also asked Dan to share some of his ideas and images (including the bromeliad-artemisia- urn-and-melianthus moment at Chanticleer, above) with us, no matter whether we can attend. A Q&A with this enormously talented plantsman and garden artist.

Each day in the garden reminds me that I am blessed, even when it is raining ping-ping balls of ice from on high, as in the video clip above. (Try watching it full screen by clicking the Vimeo logo; for perspective, it’s shot through a window and the pond in the distance is more than 25 feet from where I was standing, in awe.)BEFORE FIVE concurrent weather warnings converged overhead that afternoon to form the hailstones and, eerily, a small tornado, I had been thinking about Oklahomans, including the Shawnee garden club I’d lectured to in 1999. It was the first time I’d ever seen the formidable red clay up close—I think I actually said, “Is that soil?” before I got hold of myself and my manners. Also on my mind was Dee Nash, the “Red Dirt Ramblings” garden writer who always has a smile and a kind word. Even this last week; even among her tears.“After tornadoes

“Vote for the Dinner Party,” the headline on Pollan’s story reads, says, and then the subhed: “Is this the year that the food movement finally enters politics?” It’s pegged to the looming vote on Prop 37, the California Ballot Initiative on the labeling of genetically modified food (which as Pollan points out is not some new invention, but something Americans have been eating for 18 years).  But it goes much farther, because as he says:“What is at stake this time around is not just the fate of genetically modified crops but the public’s confidence in the industrial food chain.” A must read (which will appear in print in the Sunday Times magazine).more on prop 37, with an infographicWANT TO READ MORE about Prop 37, and particularly about what companies support labeling and don’t–a shocking list, if you haven’t s

What special innovation in technique, exceptional plants, or flair with color or design did each of those 40 hand down to the rest of us? Matthew Biggs’s book is loaded with their garden wisdoms, and also with the charming tale of each luminary and how they got to the garden in the first place.Matthew, who trained at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, is the author of various earlier books including “The Complete Book of Vegetables,” and is a regular presenter on BBC Radio 4’s “Gardene

Years later, when visiting English gardens, I’d smile to see what are referred to as “houseleeks” happily growing on shed roofs, out of stone walls, and in other unfussy spots.These days at nurseries and in plant catalogs, Grandma’s version, the Sempervivum, are just the start–joined by what my friend Katherine Tracey of Avant Gardens Nursery calls “the other hens and chicks.”I got inspiration on the creative use of succulents from Kathy on my public-radio show and podcast. Read along as you listen to the April 1

Joe gardens in the Atlanta area, but has for years visited gardens around the nation as the longtime creator and host of the much-loved“Growing a Greener World” program on public television. I’ll confess that he’s also someone I treasure as a virtual colleague, someone I often email with my own Urgent Garden Questions for advice, so I’m especially glad he’s helping us get started on our 2018 paths.Read along as you listen to the Dec. 18, 2017 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).garden recap and resolutions, with joe lamp’lQ. Did you close up that garden down there in Atlanta or what?A. You kno