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 […]
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. […]
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 […]
Just north of St. Ignace and the bridge over the Straits of Mackinac, the sign for the Mystery Spot looked pretty much as it did the last time I saw it. There seems to be a Mystery Spot just about everywhere. I know there are at least three in California alone. Mystery Spots purport to […]
Where have all the flowers gone? American cities, proud hubs of the arts, increasingly lack the very soul of culture: the flower. The original earthly joy, flowers bestow what our urban spaces are most in need of: beauty, romance, delirious color, fragrance, and a panoply of extraordinary forms. Our urban centers, meanwhile, are reveling in […]
At the keynote speech of the Urban Agriculture Conference in New York City, organized by The Horticultural Society of New York, George Ball, Burpee Chairman and CEO told leading-edge urban gardeners and rooftop farmers to “stop and smell the cut flowers”. Most urban agriculture projects consist mainly of vegetables and herbs with occasionally a few […]
