A greenhouse allows you to get your seedlings going sooner and also provides a place to grow crops that are sensitive to weather changes. I set up my small, yet efficient greenhouse in a space that gets full sun most of the day.

Rejuvenating the soil with mulched up leaves and compost every year is a must. New gardeners don’t realize the importance of this until their crops fizzle and don’t reach their full potential. I made this rookie mistake last year. My husband and I expanded our garden plot, and we didn’t use compost on the previous year’s plot. Even though we changed the flow of our rows from north to south to east to west, the eastern end of the rows didn’t produce as much harvest as the other end that was “new” garden area.

This worry manifests in depression, yes, but it is not the thing itself. Despite being a stigmatized and misunderstood state, depression may at times be nothing more than a sign that one is awake to—that one cares about, that one feels—the greater worry of the world. The worry of the world, which does not recognize the individual human face, pervades the mass and is in fact defined by the mass. Mass incarceration, mass killings, mass warfare, mass ecocide (literally the killing of home), mass violence of all kinds: All these things are legion. To try to bear them is to be overrun.

Matthew Haughton: While I was spending my time learning Tom Petty or Nirvana songs—or trying to write lyrics like Leonard Cohen—the landscape was there, and the music of the hills, too. So, those songs, the ones born out of the landscape, seemed to soak into me back then, giving me a deeper awareness of where I was—those folk songs that I heard. When you are a kid with a guitar, it is all about “getting out.” But your position in those hills sinks in all the same. Even now, people like Roscoe Holcomb inspire my writing.

A tale spun out as if from a reel of dynamite fuse, Fries’ Ash Grove winds a precarious, rocky way through darkness, back into the light. Like the mine shafts that pierce the peaks around Ash Grove, through the deft storytelling of the author, the plots twist and turn, narrowing into blackness and dead ends. Characters disappear around corners, and then reappear as suddenly as a coal train around a hairpin bend.

In memory of the children lost at Sandy Hook Elementary and in Syrian war zones, and of all children ever lost anywhere.

December 17, 2012

I cracked my children’s bedroom doors,
looked upon them as they napped,
upon two children vulnerable
to anything they had mistrusted,
which could be anything.

Surely sleeping innocents do not belong
in such times we call these times.

With football season upon us, Love’s Winning Plays by Inman Majors will whet readers’ appetites for a good football game, especially the back story of the game in all of its managed chaos. Love’s Winning Plays is a tongue-in-cheek look at Southern football culture sprinkled with romantic comedy. Majors’ novel is not just for the fan of college football, but also for those who don’t think the game’s worth a bag of buttered popcorn.

By ZOLA TROUTMAN NOBLE My grandmothers wore an apron that covered nearly their whole dress, the kind of apron with a bib and wide over- or around-the-shoulders straps that joined in the back. It was an “old lady” apron, I thought. My mother wore short aprons that tied at the waist. Perhaps she thought this [...]

Harvest on the Honor System Pam Lee-Miller, of Lexington, Ky., snapped this shot on a Saturday afternoon drive to Reid’s Apple Orchard in Paris, Ky. She spotted the “self-serve” vegetable stand with an honor-box for payment. “In a world full of skepticism and mistrust, it was refreshing to find this simple reminder of days past,” [...]