David Walbert’s Backyard

David Walbert’s Backyard: The Life (and Death) Cycle
In June a black swallowtail butterfly laid a single egg in the window box of parsley on our front porch. Several days later an almost microscopic caterpillar emerged and did what caterpillars famously do. When it left its patch of parsley to become a chrysalis, we couldn’t find [...]

David Walbert’s Backyard: July/August 2008

The backyard for which this column is named — the literal backyard, at least, the one directly behind my house — has never been in danger of winning any awards from glossy design magazines. Plantain rules a few patches where I let the ducks graze too freely. The old garden bed the dogs use for [...]

David Walbert’s Backyard: June 2008

David Walbert’s Backyard: A Small Patch of Dirt
When I write about gardening I sometimes, without meaning to, give the impression that I wake every morning to survey a vast domain of neatly tilled beds and a refrigerator bursting with home-grown produce. In fact we have very little space. We own an acre and a quarter, [...]

David Walbert’s Backyard: May 2008

David Walbert’s Backyard
When I was young my parents tended a small garden: Peas, tomatoes, lettuce, parsley, zucchini, beets. All this in the small backyard of a small house in a medium-sized northern town, sheltered from a major highway by a cinder-block laundromat. My mother pickled beets, canned apple butter and pear preserve, baked wheat bread [...]

David Walbert’s Backyard: April 2008

By David Walbert
In the woods behind my house is a clump of daffodils. Each year they emerge with the first false temptations of spring and for a few brief weeks throw bright yellow sparks from the still-brown floor of the forest, garishly urging the calendar onward. Then their blossoms wilt and return to the ground, [...]