Today, greener-than-thou gardeners crusade for heirloom seeds, while unjustly damming hybrids. Increasingly, their anti-science credo has hardened into a Luddite fundamentalism, resulting in confusion among the public between hybrids and genetically modified organisms, or GMOs. Clearly, the hybrid versus heirloom imbroglio is about more than the quest for the biggest, most delicious tomato. As a […]
So close to the sun, canted to receive the longest days. So little cloud cover—or even precipitation in the air. Crops, including tests here at Fordhook Farm, are slowly drying out: roots, trunks, stems, branches, leaves. Petals wave in slow-motion. No wind; so all the desiccation comes from high temperatures and dry air. Stillness is […]
My fellow Americans, on July 4th we gather to celebrate our country’s independence and pay homage to its founders. We remember this country began as a unique adventure in freedom, individual liberty and rights guaranteed by the Constitution. The United States is today the preeminent world power and beacon of freedom around the globe. As […]
This land is your land, this land is my land, and more crucially, this land is land. As we celebrate Independence Day, let’s consider a new political party based, not on stimulants such as tea and coffee, but on flowers and vegetables. Hold your rallies in your yard. Everyone is welcome: north, south, left or […]
The litter layer of the soil is home to a myriad of small creatures. Most are familiar to the gardener, who has dug a little and turned over stones and compost piles. For the most part, these are unremarkable; the group includes worms (annelids), millipedes, centipedes, and roly-polys (a crustacean) that scurry for safety when […]
We live in a time that merits its own version of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, Charles McKay’s classic 1841 study of human follies and frenzies, such as witch hunts, alchemy and bursting financial bubbles. Our current repertoire of fallacies is rich in conspiracy theories, apocalyptic prophecies and alien abductions. One such […]
Most scourges of our native trees were inadvertently introduced to North America. Think of chestnut blight; it wiped out the American chestnut throughout its entire range in about 25 years. And Dutch elm disease virtually eliminated the American elm and changed the look of American cities in a similar period of time. Both diseases are […]
They don’t make Mother’s Day like they used to. Signed into being with Woodrow Wilson’s 1917 Presidential Proclamation, the U.S. Mother’s Day holiday has been tainted with rampant commercialism almost from its inception. Anna Jarvis, a stalwart Philadelphian, had made the holiday her mission since her mother’s death in 1905. Her late mother, Anna Maria […]
Climate change is too important to leave to the experts. For years now, partisans on both sides of the climate issue have flung graphs, glaciers and hockey sticks at each other, generating as much heat as greenhouse gases, but little consensus. For most Americans, climate change arrived on Thursday, June 23, 1988. This was the […]
Since the beginning of April, I’ve been keenly aware that the days are rapidly getting longer. Like a spool unraveling. The Sun rises and sets farther north. Now even in the upper Midwest on the first day of spring, the Sun feels positively hot on your face. Plants have sensed this too and are bursting. […]
