The winter has turned the corner— truly — our days are lengthening. The beginning of winter’s end is fast upon us — but don’t be too enthusiastic: the winter is, itself, a garden. You just don’t see it that way. Winter is not the cruelest season. It is the mother of the garden’s invention. The […]
What you will rarely encounter in the digital world of today is a sense of tradition. The change-over from daylight-saving time this weekend reminds me of a long-ago conversation with a business colleague from India. He found the notion of our biannual time shift both novel and disturbing. “You can’t do that,” he said. He […]
The sky grew darker, and when the clouds finally let loose, the water stood an inch deep on the level driveway and streamed into the window wells. Later, in the basement, among the ruined boxes of books and whatnot, I saw a little plastic bear, long forgotten, bobbing gently against the wall and floating on […]
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. […]
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 […]
