In the local royal gala orchard, long past the renewal date of 10 years for slender spindle high density, high-capital orchards, a snowball bloom has settled out into a lousy crop. The […]
A Lousy Apple Year for Vernon
Solar Tides
Morning Glory in the morning. Morning Glory in the evening. A Plant Doesn’t Have to Be Edible to Be Useful! If you plant morning glory (or let the weeds grow, as these […]
Footprints in the Interface: A Permaculture Model
Look at these choke cherries, living in the zone between the grass and the aspens. In the perfect water zone where birds that pass between trees (for shelter) and grass (for […]
How to Read Your Mind
When reading wild roses, out of focus… … is focus!
A Bee in the, um, Lettuce
Alfalfa flowers make exquisite salad, with a bright green flavour drenched in honey. Let us just give a little leeway to our fellow diners! There’s enough to share.
What the Raven of the Marble Mountains Knows
The eye gives the illusion of bringing distance close, but the raven knows more. Bushwhacking ingrown grasslands gets you nowhere fast. If you had to survive off this land, really survive, you’d light a […]
The Leaf People and the Stem People
Stem People on the left: Ants: the great climbers and farmers. Aphids: their herds. Leaf People on the right: Leaf Miners: the great wanderers, mapmakers and historians of what is passed but […]
Little Green Guys Everywhere You Look, or 10,000,000 Years of Grass
It’s beautiful to imagine that one is grass, sprouting everywhere out of the earth, living in the wind and casting and receiving pollen in the wind pouring in from the distant sea. […]
June: Deep Autumn in the Grasslands
On open hills in the grassland, it is Autumn now. At the bottom of the slopes where water collects among cattails and wild lettuce, too. In a couple weeks will come the […]
Please, Please, Please Don’t Plant That Lavender!
If you plant that lavender, the crab spiders will have nowhere to go, and they are the wolves of this ecosystem. Removing the top predator from a chain, in this case a […]
