My clay-rich Pennsylvania subsoil provided the primary building material In Hoboken, my home for over 50 years, you only need to walk a few blocks to find a pizzeria, yet I rarely bought a slice, let alone a whole pie. I have a second home in rural Pennsylvania and a year ago, I built an [...]
Sequestering carbon and reducing energy consumption with hempcrete In 2007, I bought 37 rural acres in Damascus, Pennsylvania, that included two post-and-beam barns, a 1910 farmhouse, and an old, sagging chicken coop. My long-delayed plan to convert the chicken coop to my new pottery studio finally got started [...]
A man does not plant a tree for himself, he plants it for posterity - Alexander Smith (Scottish Poet, 1830-1867) Several of my friends told me that I was too old to start an orchard. According to a Chinese proverb: The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now. I marvel at what I have planted, watching as it grows, coming to life each spring and changing through [...]
We believe that a seed is more than meets the eye: it is a time capsule telling tales of the plants, crops, and people that came before us. - Hudson Valley Seed Company From a small bucket filled with seed envelopes, my quarter-acre garden will grow. It unfolds a miracle of life, and of the seasons, repeated each year. Dormant, these seeds are waiting for the right conditions so they can germinate, thus fulfilling [...]
Beginning in the late 1930s, Dr. William Albrecht contended that human health is inseparable from soil health. He was Chairman of the Department of Soils at the University of Missouri from 1938 through 1959 and President of the Soil Science Society of America. One study he published in 1947 examined the dental records of 70,000 U.S. sailors and concluded that the health of the sailors’ teeth was linked to the health of soils in their [...]
A zillion tons of materials that could be composted get carted off to landfills each day. I manage to divert about 7 tons of this annually: spent coffee grounds from my local Starbucks in Hoboken. I gather up wagon-loads of hay cut from my fields and leaves from the wooded areas. These carbon-rich materials are mixed with the nitrogen-rich coffee grounds to concoct my special blend of java compost. I still have The Complete Book [...]
Garlic, Allium sativum, is a member of the onion family that includes shallots, scallions, leeks, chives and, of course, onions.Next year’s garlic crop will be cloned from what I harvested this past July. Each bulb of my garlic contains four to six plump cloves. Thus, to sow slightly more than 1,000 garlic plants, I took several hundred bulbs, also referred to as knobs or heads, breaking them apart into individual cloves. Only the larger, healthier cloves [...]
