Recently on our blog, Carleen Madigan, the author of The Backyard Homestead, wrote about a topic near and dear to our hearts this time of year: vegetable gardens.

April 23, 2009:
Springtime for Locavores

Like a lot of people these days, I grow a few vegetables and herbs during the summer. From one year to the next, my vegetable garden has ranged from pretty darn good to just plain pathetic. But even in the years when I've been neglectful and spent half the summer traveling every weekend and the other half sipping gin-and-tonics in the shade, I'm always able to eat something I've grown — the odd onion or leaf of lettuce, a few handfuls of basil or parsley. Even some of the weeds are edible, you know. It's one of the parts of gardening I love the most: You can really screw things up and still produce something good. (Kind of like parenting?)

Recently, though, I've made a shocking discovery: there are an awful lot of people growing vegetables and fruit during the summer, and almost no one doing it during the winter. This makes sense, in some ways, since the ground in New England freezes solid during the winter, and the average ambient temperature is somewhere around "go-outside-and-die-alone-by-a-pine-tree," as my friend Jenna Woginrich, author of Made from Scratch, would say. Not such hospitable environs for the wee spinach plant.

Clearly, this lack of warmth and sunshine spells disaster for the northerly locavore seeking fresh greens during the "off" season. In July, my local farmers markets are overflowing with salad greens, arugula, kale, chard, any kind of green you could imagine. But in February? No dice. Root vegetables and winter squash, baby — that's what you've got....

Read the rest of Carleen's post on our blog. And while you're at it, peruse our daily Book News and Read It Before They Screen It features, Matt Love's On Oregon, Kirsten Berg's rare book posts, and more!

Bear and Zooey brought word of Morrison's show back to their friends in the city. The surprising choreography, his athleticism, the building commotion. How airport security mistook the crowd gradually spilling out of Powell's, threatening to spread across the main concourse all the way to Coffee People, for some kind of medical emergency.

Morrison shrugged off the praise. He'd nailed every landing, true, but otherwise he'd been forced to cut out two separate half-twists and then, near the end of his routine, one full flip. His performance, he complained, had been compromised by tired, old legs.

Bear was having none of Morrison's modesty, if that's what it was. Did the squirrel honestly believe that anyone had walked away disappointed? Even the medics, needlessly summoned, lingered long after most of the airline passengers had rushed off to catch their planes.

Bear urged him, "Give them a taste." This in turn got Bagheera and Oreo started. Of course they wanted a sample. They chimed in, "Just a taste" (said Bagheera) and "Just a taste, a bite, a sip, you know I think I'm getting hungry" (Oreo). But Morrison wouldn't budge. They didn't know why.