Feeding the World from the Bottom Up
It is natural and normal, when looking at big problems, to look for big answers. Problems do not come much bigger than the subject...
On the Costs and Rewards of Planting Trees
I have just planted two apple trees from what my local nursery calls their “Posterity Collection,” heritage varieties grafted onto a slower-growing but durable and...
Cultivating the Candy Roaster: An Extensive Pleasure
In the spring of this year, some students and I created a modest Heritage Garden—420 square feet of raised beds built from two-by-twelves and...
Live like a Tree
I am an unlikely localist. My life is a product of globalization. My mother’s side of the family is from Singapore, China, and India,...
On Pigeons
Two autumns ago you couldn’t take a dozen steps without tripping over the decapitated corpse of a pigeon. There’d be one lying on the...
America’s Regional Fences
Robert Frost begins one of his best known poems by stating, “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.” The New England poet is...
The Names of Things
An old painting by John Miles of Northleach imagines Adam in the midst of naming all the animals in the Garden of Eden. Adam...
Conservation by the Yard
I begin with a proposition adapted from Wendell Berry—namely, that mowing is an ecological act. Mowing extends the perennial drama of photosynthesis and carbon...
Cheese Should Be Dangerous
The cheese crafted here came about as a byproduct of a larger whole, the natural dividend of a complete way of life, and this is the foundation of the best farming.
Backyard Beekeeping
I had long resisted adding ten thousand new livestock to our less than two acres. I had listened to beekeepers’ tales of bears and...