It’s been over a year since I last posted about walnut in the Willamette Valley. Our local WV population is a hodge-podge of walnuts, mostly the Claro walnut (Juglans hindsii) from California, black walnut (J. nigra) from the eastern US, and Juglans regia, the English or Persian walnut. All three of these species, and possibly … Read more

Our farm is situated at the foot of the Coast Range, in a beautiful little valley at the western edge of the Tualatin Basin. The rain that falls on our little piece of paradise drops from air masses that travel thousands of miles across the open Pacific and is therefore about as pristine as rain … Read more

Thanks to a grant from the Tualatin Soil and Water Conservation District and the participation of many partner organizations, we have had an opportunity to dive into the ecology and horticulture of several plants that are now rare or uncommon in the Tualatin Valley. Many of these plants have not previously been cultivated at scale … Read more

Hi folks, it’s been a while. I’ve taken a long hiatus as I am building a house here at the farm that I hope to live in for a while. My daughter and her lovely family have moved into the Farmhouse, and I have been displaced temporarily to the Tiny House, our guest house and … Read more

There is nothing wrong with cutting down trees. Wood is truly a renewable resource. It is clean, safe, good material for your home. It is healthy to be around and pretty to look at if used right. Mostly, it isn’t plastic which is not pretty, not healthy for people, and ultimately ends up as trash … Read more

You know you are in a real prairie if you find any of our prairie lilies among the grasses and sedges. Harvest brodiaea, hyacinth brodiaea, common camas, narrow-leaf onion and others were once common in the Willamette Valley, but the vast majority of them have been plowed and sprayed out of existence. It is one … Read more

Our species concepts are challenged in groups like Delphinium, which includes our western larkspurs. The 200 or so species of this large genus form a series of syngameons that cover much of the northern hemisphere. Species in Delphinium are ecologically, seasonally or geographically isolated, but the actual barriers to hybridization, in the event that pollen … Read more

It’s only June, but prairie bulb season is upon us again! This year’s successive heatwaves are driving everything more quickly than normal, so in terms of plant flowering and other developmental processes, we have skipped the last half of June and all of July, and here we are in August. We have asters flowering already, … Read more

Something rotten is happening in the Oregon Coast Range. It has been festering and getting worse for over 30 years, and none of the government agencies or environmental organizations dedicated to protecting biodiversity and watershed function have said boo. There is a theme in human history of turning a blind eye. People and organizations have … Read more

I am a big fan of good data, basic math, and logic. There is so much we can understand about where we are, where we have come from and where we might go with these three simple ingredients. Here is an example: AREA OF HABITABLE VEGETATED LAND ON EARTH: 25.6 billion acres HUMAN POPULATION 2025: … Read more