Few ideas are simpler: Plant a tree. Shade your house. Reduce your cooling expenses. Reduce global warming. A current program that’s giving away shade trees for free is coming out of the California Center for Sustainable Energy. Customers of San… Read More »shady deal
Rebecca Solnit wrote an essay for Extreme Horticulture,* a book by photographer John Pfahl who was the subject of one of this blog’s first posts. I bumped into the essay again as I was skimming through an anthology I’d read… Read More »matters of taste
Basil is one of those herbs that doesn’t do well stuck in the refrigerator. Whenever I buy a bunch I get out a little vase, fill it with water, and help myself to however much of the bouquet I need… Read More »a basil bouquet
When you spend your time in San Diego’s well-watered burbs it’s easy to forget that you’re living in the middle of a desert. The last significant rainfall in town occurred in February, and the unirrigated natural lands around town have… Read More »the long brown season
Opening last Friday in theaters in Los Angeles (and just a few other places) was A Man Named Pearl. The Pearl of the film is South Carolina master topiarist Pearl Fryar. The documentary doesn’t open here in San Diego until… Read More »a man named pearl
I was browsing the web for recipes for caprese salad, the classic salad of Capri using plum tomatoes, mozzarella, basil, olive oil salt and pepper. I didn’t encounter any revelations as far as ingredients or proportions, but I found several… Read More »tomato sculpture
I’ve been working on printing some of my Yellowstone photographs. While I wait for the scanner to scan and the printer to do its thing it’s a perfect opportunity to step outside and snap some random pictures of what’s going… Read More »in the garden
There’s a house across that street that is looking like it’s turning into a victim of the current mortgage fiasco. The owner bought at the top of the home valuations and probably expected prices to keep growing. When no one… Read More »a vacant house
I wanted to find the quince tree again. It probably had been close to ten years since I last hiked my nearby Los Peñasquitos Canyon Preserve. Still I clearly remembered coming upon an ancient but still fruiting quince in one… Read More »once an orchard
Problem: The rice paddy in your backyard vegetable garden is just plain blah. You need to spice it up. Solution: Unlike the grass art I posted last Friday, which was made with varying the amount of light given to the… Read More »farmers with too much time on their hands