Category: Patterns

  • Why Natives… when hanging flower pots of petunias are on sale… ugh…

    Why Natives? The Wyoming SunflowerHelianthus maximilani or the Perennial Sunflower will soon be gracing everyopen space, every road barrow pit, and my garden. Why my garden? Nothing is like the warm, golden color of these natives. Fast Food for the Road: The flowers feed late pollinators, preparing themfor migration, hibernation or egg-laying. Seeded flower heads

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  • Response to the Question: Does planting by the moon really work?

    “Each plant in each specific location under each specific moment of conditions responds specifically. You can work to create the best set of circumstances to support and encourage the best ecology for that plant even to its best death. Study in-depth or take a seed and stick it in the ground and water it. Then

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  • Soul of the Garden: Fava Beans and a Nice Chianti

    Soul of the Garden: Fava Beans and a Nice Chianti

    A series of articles to reconnect with knowledge humans gained and have lost ~ we are also the landscape.

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  • Winter Tales From The Refuge

    Winter Tales From The Refuge

    Resilience does not mean Super Woman…

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  • Spirit, Science, Craft, Bumblebees

    Spirit, Science, Craft, Bumblebees

    Last year on one of those very early spring days of cold shade and clear sunlight, the open space near the front steps to the cabin was filled with a low rumble. It was so loud that I checked the approach to the nearby airport for the gigantic FedEx freight plane preparing to land. I

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  • Disruption and Integration 1: Pasture Improvement & Terrorism

    “Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it.” – Helen Keller.  ** The pasture behind the loafing shed looked silver in the horizontal light of late evening. That silver was the filter of the painful, sharply barbed seed heads of Downy Brome

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  • Closure from Cornell: Soul found in design….

    In 1987 I had a major life-changing event which moved me away from a twelve year career in law enforcement and into emergency and disaster management. After writing several major plans, I was approached by the local district coordinator for the USDA, NRCS to coordinate a 36-agency program to restore two major anadromous fisheries watersheds

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  • Upon Being Asked to Reflect: Pattern Language, Salingaros Article and Permaculture Design

    Language has always been my favorite past time. I have been a writer from the moment I could hold a crayon.  Conversely, mathematics destroyed me through most of my education…until graduate statistical analysis. I still remember being terrified by the thought that I had to get a passing grade in statistics. But more clearly I

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  • The Asparagus Not in the Store

    “Nothing we see or hear is perfect. But right there in the imperfection is the perfect reality. ” -Shunryu Suzuki

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  • The Sensative Dependency on Initial Conditions

    There is an air about good soil. It smells rich, dark, alive. It is the source of “earthy”. It unfolds in your hands, revealing broken stems, shattered, dark leaf parts, wriggling earthworms. It is moist and warm and completely uncommon in this place where I live. Here, in the Big High and Dry that kind

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