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, […]
The True Costs of Farming in the Okanagan
If Geese are Noble Beasts, What are Pheasants?
Praise to an orchard that left apples on the ground for the neighbours. The geese are contemplative about it, the robins (to the left) are quiet, the starlings are hidden in the […]
The Best Hours of the Year
I had an unusual start in life. When the sky got like this at this time of year (and even darker at solstice), I was out pruning fruit trees, like this apple […]
Dandelion Swan Song
Aren’t the orchards pretty in the springtime, with their quaint tractor wobble reminiscent of human fragility and everything? You, too, can achieve this effect on your own yard. These babies will […]
Apple Trees Wasting Water
It is said all the time how water efficient orchards have become with trickle irrigation. Maybe not. If these trees were fruiting in the low winter sun, they would only have apples […]
Respect Your Tools
You know, that ladder, made of aluminum, costs a couple hundred bucks, and represents rivers diverted to produce electricity, salmon extirpated, and native peoples stripped of identities and futures. One could, at […]
Porcupine’s Night Journey
High up on the hill… …Porcupine leaves his hideaway… … with a trudge trudge trudge… … in the middle of the night … … on both sides of the gully … … […]
Abuse of Government Funds in Okanagan Orchards
The price of industrialization is often hidden, but sometimes it’s out in the open. Here is a nursery within a new apple orchard. These trees would have been grafted under a government […]
How Caroling Became Line Dancing … and Beyond
Here’s a modern orchard, an enclosed space, a guard or garden, all full of fruit, from the late latin ortus, or, you got it, all together now, an orchard. The beauty of […]
Smoke on the Orchards Reveals Some Structural Weaknesses in Canadian Apple Growing
Smoke is filtering out the sun. The hot August days are as cool as a warm day in March. Orchards, already struggling with a world glut of fruit, as the empty land […]
