I want worms! Earthworms that is. A few blogs back I wrote about how topsoil is the key to a healthy civilization reviewing a 1975 paper, Topsoil and Civilization. (This link will download the whole 159 page book as a pdf – or you can email me and I will send it as a 1.6… (read more)
I get along with a little help from my friends (and family). Making it through grape harvest is relaxing, fun, challenging, frustrating and tedious all at the same time. Luckily this year I had help at crucial times harvesting grapes and people seemed to have fun helping out. So far this year we have harvested… (read more)
Is drying pears more important than sharing stories with people? Not exactly a fair question most would agree, but one I have been wrestling with since pears from our tree are ripening quickly and will soon be rotting if we don’t get them dried or preserved. So getting time to sit down and write my… (read more)
In a lot of ways, August was a rerun of July. The sky is gray with smoke, the sun sets and rises as a bright red ball. We check every day for new fires and what is going on with the old ones. We are about to break a 1917 record for days over 90… (read more)
Once again we are engulfed in smoke and have been for 3 days. It is our “new normal” for this time of year. The sun is an orange ball in a gray sky. The shadows seem to be blue. You can barely see across Lake Roosevelt. We wake up in the morning and check the… (read more)
This is the 4th of July and I am writing a blog for June. I’m not at a party or watching fireworks. That’s the way June was too. I started writing a May blog while in Seattle just before my father’s 95th birthday party. Sometimes quiet time is hard to come by. It’s the big… (read more)
Spring finally came in a flash. The same day that I took the bird feeder down since there are plenty of bugs for the chickadees and other local birds the hummingbirds came back and wanted their feeder put up. Instead of building a morning fire to warm up the house we are charging the electric… (read more)
It started out like a normal April. I was doing a lot of grape pruning and planting cuttings as I went. We had just had our first artichoke dinner the night before and temperatures were starting to stay above freezing. To verify the temperature I started comparing our analog (alcohol-filled) thermometers with our digital one…. (read more)
In like a Lion, Out like a Lamb. That’s the standard rap for March. It was actually something like that but it took it’s time getting to the lamb part. I was done with pruning and setting off on a road trip at this time last year. This year I am just getting going on… (read more)
Okay. It’s official. I’m tired of snow. But actually I’m hoping it stays cold for another week or so. Loggers used to like working in the snow because you can move a lot of logs on a sled and the snow protects the ground from destruction while you do it. We have had a big… (read more)
