Summer of Love
Today in a rare fit of responsible reading I picked up a copy of the Wall Street Journal . There, in the inner section that addresses something livelier than bond trading, was the lead article that proclaimed the summer of 2009 to officially be the most boring summer --and therefore by their calculus the worst summer-- in modern memory. The article bemoaned the heavy...
Hey There Delilah!
This is Delilah. She is my chicken. She is the best chicken in the world, but that's just my opinion. I've raised her since she was a baby chick, and now she's about five months old. Pretty soon she will be able to have her own babies. And then I can start all over again. The end. " />
Your Children's Farm, Part 1
How will your children eat? That is to say, how will your children, when they are your age, get food on their table? If you guess that they will drive to the grocery store once a week and buy bananas from Central America, pork from Iowa, and a salad mix from California, you're wrong. The way they obtain food --and the type of food they obtain--...
Your Children's Farm, Part 2
Meet Dr. Hubbert In the 1950s, M. King Hubbert, a far-thinking scientist who worked for Shell Oil, postulated that one day oil production would peak and then begin a predictable decline. He guessed that this would occur in the United States in about 1970 and would occur on a global basis in the 1990s. Revered for his intellect before he made his predictions, he was...
Solving the Mortgage Crisis: A Modest Proposal
A few days ago the federal government borrowed another $300 billion or so that will one day have to be repaid by Americans who are now approximately three years old --hey, they never objected-- so the money could be applied to help alleviate a little mortgage debt across America, or, say, in the Vegas condo market. Cut to our greenhouse. Uber heirloom...
Down with the Bug
Bugs never sleep. They mount an ongoing assault, wave after pestilent wave, against the cornucopian paradise lying within our garden's boundaries. And yet, despite their highly evolved abilities to find and take our food, we are not without our defenses. What appears to the unschooled observer to be a quiet place of vegetal bliss, our...
Spark of Genius
Farms grow more than just food. They grow ideas. Farms seem to provide just the right balance of ingredients to inspire practical innovation: Lots of time alone with an unending string of minor (and sometimes major) crises and the everpresent demands of hard work. These forces seem to move creative men and women to think of better ways to do...
Where the Wild Things Are
No lawn worthy of that name in the South is without its contingent of azaleas. If you've traveled through our area in the spring you can never forget the breathtaking explosion of color afforded by the hybridized, domesticed cultivars of those shrubs. They're beautiful, but not unlike the colors of impatiens, the azaleas' colors draw from the aggressively fluorescent...
Some Pig
We have a basic pattern with our red wattle breeding program: We sell all the baby females because there is a high demand for registered breeding stock, and one boar can service many sows. Every now and then we sell an exceptional baby male for breeding, and these lucky few are destined for a long and amorous life. But, most of the males are castrated, released to...
A Taste of Summer
It was simply a beautiful weekend with mild nights, a light breeze, and the thermometer approaching 80 degrees in the hottest part of the day. The new litter of red wattle piglets, barely a week old, took advantage of the balmy weather to explore their new world with a focused industriousness while the older pigs were content to take a cool shower. The sheep and cattle dined on...
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