Summer 2022

One of the many things I’ve been diving into heart-first in my new role at GreenPrints is reading the letters sent in by you, our dear readers. It warms me to hear how GreenPrints brings you a steady source of peace, laughter, and connection, and how many of you, especially our longtime subscribers, re-read your old issues.  READ MORE

Sean Dietrich: A columnist and novelist from Santa Rosa Beach, FL, Sean is known for his wise—and funny—words on the American South.

Karin Hedetniemi: A published writer and photographer from BC, Canada, Karin recently installed a Little Free Library on her front lawn.  READ MORE

This morning two dozen homegrown tomatoes appeared on my doorstep. I arrived home to see Piggly Wiggly bags hanging from my doorknob, and I almost lost control of my lower extremities.  READ MORE

I longed for a garden with flowers—at least one that would bloom more than three months of the year. So after nearly three decades on the snowy Canadian prairies, my husband Jim and I moved to the West Coast, warming us up from plant hardiness zone 3B all the way to 9A. Oh, the possibilities!  READ MORE

The rocky, uneven hills of the Ozark Mountains are not known to be an agricultural paradise. The “soil” is a deep red clay almost ready to be thrown onto a potter’s wheel—and that’s when you can find some among the rocks! But the year my daughter turned 3, I decided she deserved organic vegetables, and I would do everything I could to produce a raised garden that we could work in together.  READ MORE

For 25 years, my husband and I have gardened, composted, and planted natives on a quarter acre in our small Oregon city. We shaped the yard into zones, raising veggies, building a greenhouse, creating sunny lawns, growing apples and planting wildflowers under the shade of tall Douglas firs.  READ MORE

It occurred to me several years ago that two of my three passions were so intertwined that they followed the same season. Pinball, of course, has no season and was designed to help keep people like me (relatively) sane during the cold dark season of no baseball and no tomato growing.  READ MORE

“Wendell Berry once wrote, ‘There are no unsacred places; there are only sacred places and desecrated places.’”  READ MORE

I first noticed the little white-and-brown bugs on my squash in the middle of August. “Stink bugs,” I said. “Oh, well. They’re not that bad, just stinky.” I ignored them and continued gathering green beans and purple hull peas.  READ MORE

To some, Summer means late afternoon cookouts, to others, family vacations. For me, Summer beckons memories of a garden bounty—and how we buried my father with a green bean in his pocket.

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My poinsettia is cheerily blooming at last, its tissue-paper white and red contrasting nicely with the green June grass. So what if it’s 80° in the shade, and there are geraniums (also red and white) in full bloom next to it?  READ MORE

A hot, wet Spring yielded small, intensely sweet strawberries. We ate gallons of them—in homemade ice cream or over fresh warm shortcake, sure, but mostly right out of the bowl, each glowing berry raised by its stem and devoured—every day in May we could get them.  READ MORE

We were moving to the country, but I wasn’t scared. I’d read Out of Africa, so I had a pretty good idea of what to expect. I would be just like Isak Dinesen. I would become one with nature, growing obscure crops, nursing the natives, and writing books, probably in Danish.  READ MORE

A lot of nutritionists these days are urging us to eat our way through the color wheel. The Seven Day Color Diet, for example, first popularized in 2003, suggests choosing food of a different color for each day of the week.  READ MORE

Can trees sense trouble coming? Can they tell when they are healthy or desperately ill? I’ll let my peach tree answer. But first, a glimpse at my horticultural history.  READ MORE

A couple of years ago, I walked through the dining room and saw my husband, Bill, chopping away at something. I pulled the curtains back to get a better view—and to my dismay he was chopping away at my pink hydrangea bush!  READ MORE

Keith and I planted our first garden the year before we married. We saw it as a sort of compatibility test, an opportunity to prove that if we planned carefully and worked collaboratively, of course we could turn a 40’-by-80’ rectangle of sod into a paradise of everything we loved to eat ...  READ MORE

It is a legend that began in England and spread to the colonies in the early days. If you had beehives, you knew that it was necessary to respect the honeybees by keeping them informed of important happenings that occurred in the household.   READ MORE