In 1923, a Smalqmx man, Paul Terbasket, was jailed for watering his fruit trees. This apricot tree is all that remains. She is a survivor. Today, we planted 150 apricot rootstocks to […]
Planting for the Future
The End of the Earth or Reconciliation? The Choice is Ours.
This is a post about the gently rolling hills of the shallows of an ancient lake, that are no more. It is a place where herons survived cold winters by hunting mice. […]
Cascadia: From Fish to Lumber to Tourism to …
We are on a path of social evolution. The salmon are gone, and the oysters were long go poisoned by the plutonium plants on the Columbia. The great lumber industry that followed […]
Ten Degree Below Zero: Gardening Weather!
Ten degrees below freezing is, pshaw, nothing to a dock. It uses its red leaves to make heat from the sun that the rest of us don’t get to feel. Curly dock, […]
Noxious Weeds? Don’t be Silly.
The scotch thistle is listed as a noxious weed in the Okanagan. The image below shows it after the first year of is growth. Now it’s ready to grow a tall stalk. […]
Garlic Time
Garlic says hello. First Inchelium Red. The Columbia River’s own. She says hello. So does my Russian Red. And so does my China White and, in the foreground, my young Bella Vista […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
The True Costs of Farming in the Okanagan
Farming is expensive in Canada. One way of looking at it is shown by the apple plantation below. Let’s look: Posts: harvested on the plateau, trucked, milled, impregnated with toxic copper compounds, […]
Okanagan Okanogan 