Ah, German wine, German women, and German song. It’s in “The Song of the Germany”. The third stanza is about a blooming land and is used as the anthem. The second is […]
Mystery Solved!
Thanks for helping, everyone! My mystery plant from yesterday, the one creeping along the upper shore of Okanagan Lake… … is no mystery. It is cleavers: Cleavers is a sister of coffee, […]
Fighting Fire With Weeds
Well, this is a first. Oregano that has decided to go feral. Interestingly enough, it doesn’t look as burnable, in the short term, as this bunchgrass… … and about the same as […]
Ten Years Into the Future: social and ecological sustainability in the Okanagan and British Columbia
This post is a sketch of a detailed, viable alternative to this document: There are solutions in this blog for every problem listed in this document, that avoid its high […]
When a Weed is More than a Weed
Dandelions were brought by the earliest settlers to the Pacific Northwest, as food and medicinal plants for gardens. They escaped. Earthworms were also brought by European settlers. Curiously, settler culture now encourages […]
The Pointlessness of Herbicides, or For the Love of Laziness
Herbicides are drugs for the mind. Here’s what a family down the road has done to give themselves a fix, and to take care of the Earth’s pesky problem of being alive […]
My Victory Garden
Last year, I realized that water was going to become precious, and expensive, and become a privileged product serving the real estate and tourism industry. To combat that, I’ve started harvesting rain, […]
Never Trust Electronic Communication
So, I phoned ahead, right, and asked for a strip of land to be tilled for my baby trees. What I didn’t know was that there was a 3/4″-thick piece of rebar […]
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, […]
Tiger Lilies: a Bridge Between Worlds
The tiger lily is native to china. In China, the roots are eaten like potatoes. The Columbia lily is native to Cascadia. Source. So, that makes an interesting confluence of cultures possible. […]