Tomorrow I’ll be attending the “Dedication Day” event at Apple Ridge Farm in nearby Copper Hill. I’ve been there twice to hear concerts on the performing stage and once to gather for the horse-logging demonstration a few months back. But…
Suffice it to say things will be different around here with Abby gone back to South Dakota where, as she lamented yesterday, “the only thing I can chase is grasshoppers!” Most of yesterday she spent in the creek with an…
Closer. Closer. Closest.Parts one, two and three bring us to the truth, you might say, of this vagabond beauty, wild Forget-Me-Not discovered along Nameless Creek this week.And I will confess, until now I had missed the lesson, knowing only this…
On a sandy spit of temporary island heaped up in last winter’s storms, blooming in profusion between foot-wide rivulets of Nameless Creek, we discovered a sea of pale blue flowers. (You can see a bit of red barn roof in…
&tc… This has been a difficult fern to make look nice, because unlike yesterday’s featured pteridophyte (Osmunda cinnamomea) that had feather-duster distinct spore-producing separate stalks, this Interrupted Fern (same genus) looks like it forgot what it was doing, interrupting the…
I have a few *pterible images from that Blue Ridge Parkway meadow full of ferns I discovered a couple of weeks back, and will post one or two of my favorites. As with wildflowers, the first blooms (as if ferns…
We are poised in our time between humanity’s proclivity for self-indulgence, arrogance and short-sighted self-destruction and a time of healing, cooperation and sustainable relationship with each other and the planet. Some of you understand. You feel revulsion and you feel…
“ More than 470 mountains have been destroyed by mountaintop removal coal mining. Watch this video about mountaintop removal, including excerpts from the documentary Kilowatt Ours, featuring Woody Harrelson and a soundtrack featuring an original recording of “Blowin’ in the…
Inefficiency: energy converted uselessly to heat of friction and incompletely burned energy residues: air and water pollutants. The answer: Efficiency boosts–a much better solution to having more energy and less waste (including famously: greenhouse gases). Here’s a snippet from a…
“Most people of my grandparents’ generation had an intuitive sense of agricultural basics: when various fruits and vegetables come into season, which ones keep through the winter, how to preserve the others. On what day autumn’s frost will likely fall…
Spring. A time of new beginnings. A time to take nourishment from our roots to our winter-resting branches and grow a little taller–no matter how old we are. And for this purpose–to give you an idea of the soil you…
…Abby had found the broken remnants of a tailless kite, and entertained herself (and us) for a delightful hour under the blue prairie sky. That afternoon I witnessed in a most striking way the contrast between the old-fashioned play of…
For those of you who responded to the Leave No Child Inside link last week, please take note: You can share a comment to the piece on the Orion site. The comments already posted are worth reading, if only to…