Halloween is an ancient ritual, played out on October 31, the old New Year’s Eve. In the English version of these ceremonies, which the Canadian Okanagan inherited, children dress up as lost […]
The Living Dead
Before the Crush
It is always exciting to taste a new vine as it pours out of the press into an enamel cup. Behind the sweetness, a hint of the wine tantalizes the mouth, like […]
Feral Agriculture
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 […]
Telling Time
John Keats called this time a year the “season of mists and mellow fruitfulness.” He did so in one of the most beautiful poems in the language. Here in our volcanic rocks […]
The University and the Garden
Today, Wednesday, October 26, I’ll be using my collection of East German photographs to anchor a talk about the garden at the heart of all modern universities, and the key role that […]
A Chain of Islands
Our rocks here aren’t like other rocks. For one thing, like the rocks of most of British Columbia west of the Albertan mountains, it is light, volcanic rock that erupted to form […]
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 […]
Okanagan Okanogan 