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)
When I moved to this property 35 years ago, I put a well ring on top of the ground near the garden. I thought that I could use it to make manure tea and then siphon the enriched water to the plants in the garden to both water them and add fertilizer. That never got… (read more)
I’m a rockhound. For years I have gone on field trips with the Panorama Gem and Mineral Club. On a field trip everyone arrives at a rock site and gets out of their cars. Almost immediately they split up looking for valuable rocks. After a while the group settles down into two groups that I… (read more)
There is a lot to lose as you get older: health, friends, memory, and often dreams. I sometimes think that maturity is just a matter of giving up on things you will never be great at to concentrate on those you can do well. When even those start to slip, I ask myself “who will… (read more)
I have mentioned compost in several articles in this the North Columbia Monthly over the past couple of years, notably Composing Compost in June 2019, and Laws of Nature, September 2020. So it is gratifying to get some positive feedback from readers about their experiences. Recently, J. Foster Fanning, another regular NC Monthly author, sent… (read more)
Did you ever notice how once you start looking hard at something and identifying it, you begin to see it everywhere? I used to cut my own firewood and started seeing dead snags along every forest road. Then I learned about different kinds of rocks and pretty soon while driving my wife would ask me… (read more)
It’s the time of radical changes back and forth. High temperatures without rain have persisted since June but now low temperatures and rain have returned as well. The Fall equinox sounds like one of the most even times of the year for the length of the day and night. But that balance is only a… (read more)
