Consider what happens when our plants escape our fences: Feral Grapes Growing Without Water Who says grapes need to be grown in monocultured vineyards, on expensive wires, with bird guns driving the […]
Feral Agriculture
The Price of Wine
Are you enjoying laying down all that cash for a bottle of Okanagan Valley wine, maybe a dry as a rattler’s belly merlot from Nk’mip winery in Osoyoos? This is North America’s first […]
Strike Out!
Ah, sometimes you bite into an apple and get a mouthful of delicious irony. Here, for instance, is a BC Tree Fruits radio spot ad about marketing local apples, presumably from the […]
The Dirt on Dirt
The Okanagan is full of dirt, but most of it didn’t come from here. It was brought by water. Here’s what I mean: Silt bluffs by Penticton At the end of the […]
Wild Harvest
The fruit that this rich land produces is dependent upon mining the water resources that used to flow down from the hills. As a result of the corresponding loss of spawning channels […]
Choke
When I was a boy in the Similkameen, we were told that choke cherries would, well, choke you. Fruit that grew wild on the land was, we were told, poisonous. Sigh. Such words are […]
Wild Apples
The American natural philosopher Henry David Thoreau died of tuberculosis in May, 1862. He lived to see the apples bloom that year and begin to swell into fruit, but not to mature […]
Royal Gala Country
Late in September, a forklift driver at a Kelowna apple packing house goes on a hunger strike for publicizing that a truckload of Washington Royal Gala apples was inside his warehouse during Royal […]
Food and Industry
Here’s an example of what can happen when a horticultural industry is replaced by a technological one: Hanford, Washington The plutonium for the Nagasaki bomb was created on the Columbia, in the […]
The Big Picture
The big picture is vast and complex. Maybe not. Take a look. Mullein Overlooking Bella Vista and the Commonage Hint: the Mullein is not a weed here. It is a native plant […]
Okanagan Okanogan 