botany & gardening

Pondering the Pollinator Effect

Pondering the Pollinator Effect

Ever heard of The Butterfly Effect? According to Wikipedia, the butterfly effect is the part in chaos theory that holds there is a “sensitive dependence on initial conditions in which a small change in one state of a deterministic nonlinear system can result in large 

The Sweetest Sound: National Geographic on Flowers Responding to Pollinators’ Sounds

The Sweetest Sound: National Geographic on Flowers Responding to Pollinators’ Sounds

We opened our hive for the first time yesterday since welcoming honeybees to our farm. The collective remained completely calm and unperturbed by our presence and continued humming right along, hard at work building comb and tending brood as we shuffled the top bars to 

Botany, A Poem by Berton Braley

Botany, A Poem by Berton Braley

Botany There should be no monotony In studying your botany; It helps to train  And spur the brain– Unless you haven’t gotany. It teaches you, does Botany, To know the plants and spotany,  And learn just why They live or die– In case you plant 

bright ideas for a bold, beautiful garden

bright ideas for a bold, beautiful garden

Visitors to our Santa Fe farm often commented not only on the delicious flavor and prolific yield of our fruit and veggie gardens, but also on the enduring freshness of the items they yielded: most things stayed fresh looooong after similar store-bought items would turn or wither. We had 

happy plants for da bees!

happy plants for da bees!

With spring showing her slip in everything from fruit blossoms to new blades of grass, lots of green thumbs are itching to get in the garden and plant in earnest. As you might imagine, I’m partial to organic, unsprayed garden gems that not only have medicinal