As today’s the first day of spring, it seems timely to ask, why does anyone go on spring vacation? It seems odd to fly off to a southern, tropical, virtually springless destination at the very moment that one of the great astonishments of life on earth is taking place right at home. When friends tell […]
This winter’s epic storms lavished near-record amounts of snow on a vast swathe of the American landscape. At my farm here in Bucks County, PA, five feet of snow have fallen since Thanksgiving, leaving the ground covered with a snowy mantle several feet deep. Increasingly I hear friends and colleagues complain of “snow fatigue.” They […]
Now we know. The legendary, health-boosting powers of vitamin and mineral supplements are indeed the stuff of myth. A recent editorial in the Annals of American Medicine plainly states: “We believe that the case is closed—supplementing the diet of well-nourished adults with (most) mineral or vitamin supplements has no clear benefit and might even be […]
Amid all the brewing brouhaha about Obamacare, the very foundation of healthcare scarcely gets mentioned. By all means, let’s make health insurance available and affordable for Americans: at the same time, let’s do our darndest to make it less necessary. What we know as “health insurance” is in fact “sick insurance,” since it only kicks […]
Hybrids Are NOT “FrankenFoods” Many people misunderstand the term ‘hybrid’ when it appears on seeds or plants, mistakenly thinking it has something to do with GMOs or ‘genetically modified organisms’. But hybrids have been used in everyday agriculture for hundreds of years and are not the product of modern genetic engineering in a lab. […]
Eschatologists abound. The world, in someone’s view, however you wish to define it, is always about to end. A pair of predictions was put forth a few of years ago by Rev. Camping of Oakland, CA. Many of the Reverend’s radio followers sold all their belongings to join him, without encumbrance, at the Rapture. When […]
George Ball discusses the future of gardening in this interesting piece by Dean Fosdick of the Associated Press on where the gardening industry is headed in the year 2020 and beyond. Original article appears under the title “Climate of Change Ahead for Gardening”. You can read the original Associated Press article here. […]
“The hardest thing to see is what is in front of your eyes,” Goethe said. After going online this morning, I have seen what is right in front of my eyes, and I rather I hadn’t. Have I been asleep, blind, or both? How else to explain my previous failure to perceive the proliferation of […]
Not every evening but most during the last month the Canada geese have flown over. They seem to be heading for the big lake and open water. That’s what I think anyway. Sometimes they drift over in easy flight and large flocks so high their calls sound distant. During fog, though, they fly low and […]
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. […]
