Archive RSS Feed: Washingtonpost A Cooks Garden by Barbara Damrosch

Savoring Spring's Temptations

"Never shop when you're hungry" is good advice. On the way home from work it's easy to fill the cart with food you don't need. On Saturday, after breakfast, there's a chance you'll stick to your list.

Corn Smut: A Reputation Redeemed

Here's the word: Silver Queen, that old favorite sweet corn variety, has a reputation for smut. Not the lurid kind. The kind that erupts from an ear of corn in a large, bulbous mass. It is a parasitic fungus that affects other parts of the plant as well, and most anyone who grows corn has made its acquaintance.

Growing Peas That Please

At the time of our country's founding, the saying was that a good gardener could produce peas by the king's birthday. The date was the Fourth of June, and the ruling monarch was George III, nicknamed "Farmer George" for his zest for agriculture. Less beloved by his former colonists, his connection with their pea crop became remote. Northerly states strove for a July 4 harvest instead, a choice both patriotic and timely for their climate. Meanwhile, in the region of the nation's capital, the traditional date for English or garden pea planting became George Washington's birthday, which happens to be today, Feb. 22.

Lettuce's Brief Spring Fling

Flanders & Swann, the British musical duo, memorably summed up the season that will soon be upon us: "Spring. . . . Missed it last year. I was in the bathroom."

Planning a Plot Without a 'Net

Country people used to look to the sky for gardening advice, and some still do, taking cues from the phases of the moon, the positions of the constellations, the angle of the sun, the shape of the clouds. More typically now, a tiny, slow-moving dot of light beams an endless stream of fact and fiction to the satellite dishes in their yards, and thence to their PCs and Macs. Tidbits of plant lore appear with a click of the mouse. The right time to sow chervil root? Click! A source of Italian peppers? Click!

Unearthing Clay Soil's Virtues

A hero with feet of clay is one with hidden flaws, but if your garden has feet of clay its flaws are obvious. In spring, clay soil remains cold. Puddles refuse to drain. If you squeeze a handful of wet clay soil it will remain in one piece, slippery, sticky and marked with your fingers' imprint. In dry weather it will seem more crumbly, but it can often form an impenetrable crust, cracked like the surface of an inhospitable planet. Seedlings struggle to break the surface. Plant roots are sometimes heaved out or ripped apart when deep fissures appear.

'Bumpkins' Grow Their Own Bliss

There's an old joke about the guy who left farming with a small fortune -- having entered it with a large one. Farming is, theoretically, a moneymaking enterprise. That is what distinguishes it from gardening. But in reality it is half business and half demonic possession.

A Stalk on the Wild Side

Cherry bombs, the exploding kind, must have been named after cherry tomatoes, the edible kind, which burst in your mouth with a charge of candy-sweet juices. Pop one in and another must follow, whether you're raiding the shopping bag in your car or gorging your way down a garden row. The outdoor route is pure luxury, when the little orbs are warmed by the sun, their vitamin C at magnum force.

The Eminently Edible Elderberry

Raise your hands. How many of you celebrate the summer solstice by making elder flower fritters? No? How about making elderberry wine from the dark purple fruits that follow? Never? Have you ever seen an elderberry bush? Okay, let's start there.

Down Under, Gardening Isn't Lost in Translation

Foreign travel is said to broaden one's horizons, but Australia turns it around backward. Let's start with the sun. There it still rises in the east and sets in the west, but it traverses the northern sky instead of the southern, moving from right to left. At night the moon's crescent turns the opposite way, and Orion is upside down. If you leave home in spring, as I did on a recent lecture trip, you arrive in fall, two calendar days later.