Here we are in a community garden in Stein am Rhein, Switzerland, an old roman fortress, and before that a 4000-year-old settlement where Lake Constance becomes the Rhine.
A shaded picnic bench for the parents, in the middle of the garden, and a magpie nest for the kids, up in the sky, where they like it.
Rome, and the old sub-alpine culture might be gone, but its shadow can be very fiine!
The first people of spring are the first people of the winter to come.
Welcome back!
December’s pasta sauce in her first, peppery blush.
We are all celebrating.
And that’s why posts have been short this past month!
This is the cake my grandmother made. I used to walk 2 miles for a piece of it. 50 metres of that was across a 15 cm. wide set of planks nailed to the top of a barbed wire fence across a flooded swamp. It was worth it. Over the decades, my mother used to make it whenever I came by. Now I found the recipe, and here it is with my own Fintry apple, which helped. 
It is gardener approved.
It’s easy, too. Grandma would never let you down.
To keep it a family thing, forget the currants. Thanks for asking, Jim. Thanks for baking, Martha and Dorothy! Love ya!
Late in the winter, or early in the spring, the frost, followed b ty thaw and rising sun, will turn these rose hips sweet …
… right when they are needed. That’s why they do this and why they thrive. The result is a map of hunger.
I went to my tree this morning and knew ….
..this is why we live…
…this morning and another year. The last transparent thinks so, too! Look at her with her red haven friends.
You can see how she got her name.
Mmmmm.
We know who makes the best summer apple pies. Here she is, the summer pie maker.
She was born in Russia 220 years ago. Look how young she looks in my garden.
Here in Vernon, she usually ripens in late July. This year, three weeks early (two weeks before my apricots). Here she is, hanging out with marigolds, tomatoes, garlic, spinach (for seed) and marjoram.
These are amazing pie and sauce apples. We could have a massive industry here, supporting a large processing and food industry. Instead, we have sweet fall apples to compete with industrial-scale production from Washington, while the warmer contours of the food industry are left to wine: a luxury product, exuberantly priced. People want pie. Don’t you? And tart apple sauce for those pork roasts in October? Of course you do!
The sustainable beauty of transparents is their sweet tartness, their earliness and their processing suitability: no cosmetic pesticides necessary, and a very short season for other pests. What’s more, they respond well to climate, so we could pick them continuously for a month, from the bottom of the valley to the top, using water in the cool zone, where water consuming fruits like this belong. Besides, they’re even better when grown to be picked in September, just before mountain frost. And they are a remarkably easy tree to grow, incredibly resistant to bacterial disease. Look how clean they are!
As another bonus, there’s a variety called Lodi, which ripens five days later, and stores longer. We could further extend our production. The trick of surviving in the Okanagan is about using water cleverly. These apples which take up water in our wettest month, June, and then are done, are a good start. We could exceed the employment of the grape industry, easily, which is a darned good use of our water, too. Think transparents. Think pie. If you’re in the Canadian Okanagan, there were some at Quality Greens last week. They’re probably all gone, but you might like to check.
Welcome to the second of a series of posts on creating a sustainable Okanagan. They are archived on the menu bar above. Today: smart water. Read on…
Wherever there is a crack, stuff grows in the Okanagan. 
That crack above has yellow clover and feral grasses, but there are cracks, right on the sidewalk beside the main highway through town, which are growing wireweed, purslane, amaranth, wild lettuce and plantain, which is to say four food crops and one medicinal plant great against mosquito bites. As for downtown Kelowna, the Okanagan’s urban knot, have a look at this wild lettuce, growing behind a downtown restaurant.
Now, it’s not going to fly to grow our food in these cracks beside the highway, or in alleys, due to pollutants from traffic, but let’s consider a few principles here:
In other words, the Okanagan is neither a desert nor dry. Look at how a simple roadway can be a seasonal river. That water could have been easily diverted at that joint, and used to grow the thistles I mentioned yesterday, or sunflowers, for a bird seed industry, or anything you like.
The land is simply not dry. Only the air is, and not always. Here’s that alley again. Note the tree on the right, and the water pouring out of a roof drain, uselessly onto asphalt.
Water is limited in the Okanagan, and so is agricultural land, but consider: every sidewalk and every road has cracks, and every road has ditches, and they all work on the same principle, collecting water, moving it and generating life with it. It’s not necessary for water to flow freely to create crops in this climate. With that in mind, here’s a crack:
Rocks like that are everywhere in this region, split by winter frost and spring thaw. They collect water. Not only that, they collect bird droppings, which contain saskatoon seeds, which bloom and give fruit. The image below shows a very common local sight.
The rock shelters the young plant from deer, better and more elegantly than snow fencing around inappropriate, irrigation hungry Japanese maples …
…and collects water and manure (from birds and marmots) and nutrients (from crumbling rock) to nurture the plant, despite the ongoing lack of free-flowing water. The trick in this climate is not to get water to flow but to get it to stop as soon as possible. This principle can be applied throughout the valley, for landscaping projects and even for creating farming land where no water is otherwise available. And we’re close. Look at the decorative rocks in the landscaping above. They are visually appealing (perhaps) and collect heat. They could have been arranged to collect water as well. We’re close on this one. Let’s take that one extra step.
The saskatoons are getting ripe, and what a year for them it is.
Some people don’t seem to get it. I mean, the earth gives gifts, and (*&^!!@#!!
A week ago, that young bush was full of berries. Well, there’s no accounting for the human need to surround the cave with skulls. Still, some people hire landscapers who plant domestic saskatoons for aesthetic reasons, to tie together the golf course, Arizona and Tuscan themes of the low-maintenance yard. They are nice and sweet! Yay!
Of course, when the low hanging fruit is gone, it’s gone. Pshaw. That’s so, like, as yesterday as fake stone facing for particle board fascia for pressurized copper-stained wood supports set on concrete poured into a concrete tube backfilled by a bobcat loader.
The does are off having their fawns now, so this event is purely stag, you understand.
The world is rich.
Mmmmmm.
When flowering plants came on the earth they raised their blossoms into the air, and coloured them brightly with light, so that insects, the creatures of air and light, would find them. Together, these two groups developed in potential together, yet no matter how far they have gone on this joint journey the original gesture of lifting the point of renewal into the light remains and is one of the strongest, abiding characteristics of (for example) the rose and all her daughters. Even the apples (a very robust rose) below retain the gesture of the flower as their stems swell around the growing seeds in the ovaries, fertilized by the bees that came to the flower’s light.
Humans, too, contain these ghosts, or spirits, of the original gestures out of which we have grown, and of the environments we have grown with, which includes the world of apples, for whom all of history has been no time at all but is still opening, beautifully, into the light.
