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Smoke Map
The skies were full of wildfire smoke today. To get a sense of where it’s coming from, check out this really cool interactive map that NOAA updates regularly. Kind of shrinks the country, doesn’t it? And in doing so shrinks the world.
Turning a Patch of Lawn into a Vegetable Garden, Part 5
There’s an old axiom that to be a good builder you need to learn to think like a drop of water. Farming and home gardening can be similarly reduced to: you need to learn to think like a weed. There’s hundreds of years worth of cultivated plant knowledge at our fingertips, and expert growers who […]
Turning a Patch of Lawn into a Vegetable Garden, Part 4
I’m working on a piece about soil fertility for Volume II of the Almanac, and part of my background research involves reading a book the late Jack Lazor wrote on grain growing. Lazor broke soil fertility down into three interdependent realms: the chemical, the physical, and the biological. And he made the point that conventional […]
Trout Fishing
My friend Kris and I met in Mrs. Kevorkian’s kindergarten class, which means I’ve been a bad influence on him for three decades now. When I suffer from panic attacks brought on by the realization that another summer’s slipping through my fingers, I often find myself dialing his phone number. “Wrap it up,” I said […]
Eyes Wide Open
The idea that chickens and gardens are symbiotic is more than half bunk. They do eat bugs, but both good bugs and bad bugs. If your ratio of bad to good is such that you’re willing to play the odds, consider that they don’t eat many bad bugs when they have a belly full of […]