Clik here to view.
End-of-Year Lessons
William Alexander’s The $64 Tomato is a treatise on how one family spent thousands of dollars to grow a few bushels of vegetables. While Mr. Alexander’s methods and situations are very different from...
View ArticleClik here to view.
A Year in the Garden
Eating home-grown food is an enormously satisfying experience. On a beautiful fall day, the pleasure of eating raw broccoli right off the stem was superior to eating it in most restaurants I’ve been...
View ArticleClik here to view.
5 Quick Tips on Starting Your Own Garden
If Earth Day isn’t enough to encourage you to grow something, then I don’t know what can make you plant some seeds. But if you’re just afraid of failure, here’s a few vegetable gardening tips to help...
View ArticleClik here to view.
A Garden Returns to Nature
Because we sold our house recently and due to my 50-hour-a-week job and long commute, It was untenable for me to plant a garden this spring. Also, helping start and run the Morton Grove Farmers’ Market...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Illinois at Harvest Time
I am taking a brief, unpaid sabbatical from helping run the Morton Grove Farmers’ Market so I can visit some of our fellow Chicagoland Saturday markets. First stop was Green City. No doubt they’ve been...
View ArticleClik here to view.
In Anticipation of a Dirtier Life
As my family sits impatiently waiting for the spring thaw to heat up the housing market so we can finally acquire a piece of land in our desired area, I find myself more and more detached from the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Reflections on the pre-Market
My co-volunteer on the Morton Grove Farmers’ Market committee wrote a personal essay about our pre-opening Mother’s Day Market. I don’t think I could have better summed up the spirit of why we put our...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Local Market attracts Scouts
Another guest post from my colleague, Mary Longe, co-conspirator at the Morton Grove Farmers’ Market. This is especially timely, given that the Girl Scouts now offer a badge for locavorism. Managers...
View ArticleClik here to view.
2011 Growing Roundup
We spent a long time looking for a house. Even in what was supposed to be a buyers’ market, we had a heckuva time finding sellers who weren’t still living in the real estate bubble and were willing to...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Spring Bounty 2012
This was an odd March, as you will recall, and the unlikely heat wave we saw lured some of us into planting gardens way earlier than is advisable. Most edible plants can’t go in the ground until after...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Keeping Up with the Neighbors
All of us at the new house is pleased with the returns from the garden this year, although our Ukrainian neighbors have had a fantastic harvest. Since both gardens are close to each other, it’s hard...
View ArticleClik here to view.
End of the 2012 Garden and Market
Both my garden and the Morton Grove Farmers’ Market have all but drawn to a close, driving me into the long Chicago winter with nothing to do but plan for the spring. We’ve finished off the last of the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
A Lusher Garden in 2013
As a backyard farmer, I think I’m getting the hang of it. Last year’s crop was perfectly acceptable, considering that we’d recently purchased a fixer-upper house and needed to build the infrastructure...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Gathering the 2013 Harvest
It was a good year for vegetables near our front stoop, in pots on our balcony and driveway, in the backyard and in the alley. I know that climate change is screwing up the moisture and the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Fences Make Good Puppies
Since we purchased our new homestead and planted a number of garden beds, I’d always been worried about infiltration by rodents, skunks and rabbits. To be fair to these smaller mammals, they did very...
View ArticleClik here to view.
About a Betta
What you see here is a betta, an inexpensive, hardy Siamese fighting fish living in a plastic tank in my living room. I’m not a huge fan of the situation, although I do enjoy Thai food. I dislike...
View ArticleClik here to view.
A 2014 Embarrassment of Local, Organic Riches
It’s been a unique “summer” weather-wise. The abundant rain and bursts of heat followed by polar vortexy coolness have confused my plants to produce the most prolific garden I have ever planted....
View ArticleMorton Grove Farmers’ Market 2014
I haven’t written about the Morton Grove Farmers’ Market on The Local Beet for a while now. Running it has kept me too busy to write about it. But as I go back to read older posts about the Market I’m...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The 2014 Garden in Review
A secondary goal of my gardening hobby is to see how long I could feed my family of four (plus a vegetable-loving dog) from the nearly 450 square feet of fertile soil in my front and back yards, should...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Gone Sauer on the Good Food Expo
If you’re the sort of person who digests food regularly and relies on a vast population of bacteria to survive, this might interest you. Lactic acid juice glistens on a forkful of fresh saurkraut. In...
View Article
