Now are dark days in the garden. Much of North America is under snow cover and even in south Florida and the Pacific and desert southwest, regions that effectively have 12-month growing seasons, with all the cold and rain, plant growth has virtually ground to a halt—it’s winter. Winter’s hard on animals too. The news […]
The epidemic of childhood obesity is now the nation’s disease, an ailment, if you will, afflicting the body politic. The phenomenon of obese American children is no anomaly, but rather the inevitable outcome of untoward legislative and corporate influences, lifestyle trends, marketing machinations, economics, and modern family life. The factors driving the childhood obesity epidemic […]
Matthew’s Gospel tells us that it was Joseph of Arimathea who requested of Pilate and was given the body of Jesus after the crucifixion. In life, Joseph was a follower of Jesus and a rich man. After receiving Jesus’ body, he buried it in a tomb that had been carved into stone and that he […]
Was Kepler a bad mathematician? He apparently made lots of computational errors. What aids he used in his ciphering I don’t know. Sliderules were available in his day, but there were not even HP programmable pocket calculators and certainly no supercomputers, so it was all paper and pencil stuff. In fairness, his mind was surely […]
It’s probably imagination, but it seems that most snail or slug attacks occur after a recalcitrant seed has finally germinated or a weak plant is showing signs of vigor. Everyone who’s ever had a garden is well aware of the damage snails and slugs wreak. They can be incredibly destructive, decimating rows of seedlings, disfiguring […]
Three friends of forty years standing get together about twice every decade. This has been my experience. We met in our teens—boarding school and first year of college—and are now squarely in middle age. Boarding school is either a benign or toxic form of neglect, but neglect in any case. This has little to do […]
Recent news has included discoveries of new planets, supernovas and even changes in the rates of the contraction of the original expansion of the Big Bang. A few friends have shared that these various cosmic phenomena make them feel a bit weird, depressed or anxious. In contrast, it makes me feel better, not worse. I […]
Some garden writers seem to have an obsession with lawns. Michael Pollan’s erroneous but extremely influential 1991 op/ed in The New York Times kicked off a two decade landscape architect parlor game. However, the debate over the ecological and environmental value of lawns is much older. Front or back worse? Side lawn okay? Organic lawn […]
Four years ago, I nearly came out of my skin with excitement about “GL 581c“, the second planet from the star (“a”), which is the GL, which stands for Gliese, the name of the astronomer who discovered it. So, the star—or sun—is Gliese. I do not know what the 581 stands for. Matrix number, most […]
Much is made of the aesthetic difference between the season long “show” of flowers and the end-of-season vegetable harvest. Keen gardeners know that a garden can be more nuanced than this; and, on closer inspection, most gardens are successional in both vegetable and flower form, from the beauty of the spring lettuces to the harvest […]
