When is a robin not a robin? Well… … when is a stone not a stone? Colour is not random. The world is not built around metaphor. There is […]
Care
When Terroir is Terror
Isn’t it… … about time … … that the growing of … … wine grapes … … and the concept of terroir… … be separated … …completely and forever?
A Mountain of Stories
All day, I pruned fruit trees under this cliff. Above Keremeos The faces appear on the edge of dark, with only fifteen minutes of light left. There sure are a lot of […]
Farming the Atmosphere
Very slowly, and with great drama and beauty, the atmosphere breaks bedrock to bits. Why are we not farming the air? It is doing this everywhere, with a bit of help from […]
Do You Digest Your Food Outside Your Body?
Birds do. Here’s a clutch of haws that have used frost and sun to break their acids down into sugars. This is the time of year that birds will come for them […]
Hope for the Earth: Settler Lessons from the Voles
The bunches grass bunches up. With the help of snow, it mounds. We could call it mound grass. We could call it a village. Note the vole highway in the lower centre […]
We Are the Sun
The sun came up last Wednesday. Isn’t that great! Looking west, away from it, was great fun. But not so much fun as looking east. Look at it projecting itself on ice […]
Changing the Climate One Porcupine at a Time
This is the closing of a series on mitigating climate change through local action. The Earth is very responsive. We can trust that. This estuary on Vernon Creek, for example, with its […]
Healing Climate Change in the Grasslands of the Okanagan
In the last couple of posts, I talked about the industrial, environmental and social costs of growing fruit in the Okanagan Valley. You can have a peek in this post: The True Costs […]
Race and Orcharding in British Columbia and Washington
This is the second of three posts about the costs of farming. This one is about the tangle between land and race. The next is about broader environmental and social factors. If […]
