Gardening

If you’ve ever come across a wild lion’s mane mushroom (Hericium erinaceus), it might strike you as something that came from the deep ocean. The beautiful, cascading spines appear more fit for life on a coral reef than the terrestrial home by which they abide. Fittingly, the texture and flavor of...

There is no better complement to a meal of wild game than fresh herbs and veggies from your own garden. Our hillside home in East Tennessee isn’t very conducive to traditional gardening, so I build raised beds as a practical, productive solution. I use plastic barrels to make beds that require...

When I first became interested in composting, I was uninterested in learning how to do things correctly and more interested in just doing them. I grabbed an old 5-gallon bucket with a lid, dumped all of my kitchen scraps and garden waste in it, and put the lid on top. A month later, I opened the lid...

“Let your food be your medicine,” I proudly remarked as I poured black bean seeds into a weekly pill organizer. My wife rolled her eyes and then popped the container into our refrigerator’s crisper drawer. We’ve been storing seeds like this for years, and in some cases, we’re even starting to...

Radishes might be my favorite vegetable because they’re so versatile in the kitchen. The first year I grew radishes I easily planted about fifty, and to my delight (and, let’s be honest, surprise), all of them germinated and grew to full size. But when I bit into one, it was disheartening to...

Imagine tomorrow you wake up having traveled 100 million years back in time to the late Cretaceous period. Depending on where you live in North America, you could be on the Island of Appalachia (present-day East Coast), the Island of Laramidia (present-day West Coast), or underwater in the Western...

Biodynamic farming methods were born of a nearly century-long struggle to right the wrongs of conventional, chemical-laden agriculture. Biodynamics is, essentially, a system of farming that relies on a deep connection to the cycles of nature and the interdependency of soil, plants, water, animals...