Today, just a little love song for needle-and-thread grass, a grass so thin that it nearly vanishes when the light burns through it. Not for needle-and-thread grass a story of the wind. […]
Weeds and Water and Wilderness
For a few weeks, I’ve booted around vineyards from the Rhone to Mosel, trying to get a glimpse of the art of farming, as it was practiced when it was still a […]
Green Wine
A wine starts long before it hits the chemist’s test tube. In fact, it starts out something like this … Baco Noir Grapes in the Okanagan At this early stage of their […]
Roman Water Today
This is a story about water. It begins a long time ago, as some stories do. Back then, the rain fell, as rain does, and the Celts were making wine out of […]
Vertical Farming
Flat ground costs money and needs irrigation, which costs money, and so it’s off to the supermarket we go, to buy vegetables from men who have money to plant fields the size […]
Earth Scripting
Three weeks of scribbling notes, while trying to figure out the ins and outs of growing grapes in pre industrial societies from the Rhone Valley in Switzerland to the Mosel in Germany, […]
Water From Rock
This is a fairly typical bit of vineyard in Germany’s Mosel Valley. Yes, grapes root in this stuff. It’s a good thing there’s lots of rain and it doesn’t get ridiculously cold. […]
Public and Private
In a grassland, the wind never stops blowing. Either it’s a dry wind falling off the mountains after dropping its ocean water on the other side, or it’s a valley wind scurried […]
The Dirt About Dirt
Do you know what pizza sauce looks like in its embryo phase? Here’s a rare sighting… Ten Thousand Year Old Post Glacial Lake Bottom Readied for Tomato Seedlings Soon black plastic sheeting […]
Vertical Agriculture
Okanagan Land is expensive. Even vineyard land in the volcanic south of Germany costs a quarter as much. That’s what happens when men from across the mountains will pay nearly anything to […]

