January 12, 2019 Is it risky to eat food grown next to the Freeway? Orchard visitors sometimes ask this question. It is an especially interesting question to me, an Environmental Protection Agency retiree and air quality specialist. The two principle ways food can become contaminated from environmental pollutants are through soil and air. In urban […]
December 19, 2017 It’s time to honor our important volunteers who live in the soil – the nematodes, protozoa, microarthropods, fungi and bacteria. All these fellows work tirelessly underground, decomposing organic matter and pooping out the nutrients in the form that plants can use. In fact, organic matter is the only food we have supplied […]
August 28, 2017 It’s dry this summer. It seems like we are either watering, or obsessing about whether we are watering too much or too little. Nobody wants to over water fruit trees. Why waste water. Excess water creates more tree growth, not more fruit, and results in nutrient leaching. Ideally, we are watering just […]