You are currently browsing the Fordhook Voice – Gardening Blog weblog archives for March, 2006.
Frequently, these days, I’m reminded of Edward Lear’s whimsical illustration titled Manypeeplia Upsidedownia. Depicting an imagined botanical species, the drawing shows a half-dozen characters suspended upside-down from a flower’s bending stem. A product of the Victorian golden age of nonsense, Lear’s fanciful drawing increasingly strikes me as all too realistic, too true to be good. […]
How reading is taught is a matter of national urgency. The ability to read is the first building block of education: the key that opens the door to all later learning. When it comes to how our public schools teach our children to read, a failed technique — whole language or “whole word” —continues to […]
Last week we had our first real freeze. What wind there was in our little vegetable garden flapped the stiff, unyielding leaves of the tomato and black kale plants. By noon, the temperature had risen above freezing. The tomato vines were droopy and those fruits that remained on the vines were water soaked with drops […]