Farming and gardening have been key components of human life for thousands of years.    They produce food but they also create a huge market for goods and services from companies aiming to farm the farmers.  In taking on the production of food and maintaining the independence necessary to realize a profit, farmers often find themselves… (read more)

A while back we watched Shang-Chi, a Marvel Series blockbuster with lots of digital effects showing scenes set in Shanghai and a hidden village deep in a bamboo forest.  Truthfully there was a lot of FX involved in the forest but they must have started with images of the real thing.  The real thing showed… (read more)

It’s September while I’m writing this. It’s raining pine needles.  After a stressful summer for most plants, you can see pine trees with lots of brown needles ready to drop.  Ironically, you can also see grasses that have suddenly become green again after some heavy rain.  Mother nature is preparing for winter. A good question… (read more)

In Frank Herbert’s book, Dune, giant sandworms produce a drug called “melange” (known colloquially as “the spice”), which is highly prized across the universe for its medicinal and mystical properties.  (wikipedia.org)  Although wildly fictional, some truths linger in that account.  Melange is created when excretions of the sandworms’ larvae react with water and sunlight. At… (read more)

When I was younger, not very studious and there was no Internet, I decided to add pigs to our menagerie of goats, chickens and a donkey.  We had extra milk from the goats and I could supplement the pig diet with culled potatoes from the Doukhobors in Grand Forks, British Columbia.  The pigs didn’t put… (read more)

As I was driving down Webley road to the lumber mill, I remembered my last visit there 35 years ago. I needed to have some 1 x 4 boards planed down to ½” from ¾“ so I could bend them into arches for my first underground arch building.  That old mill was the only place… (read more)