pendragon orchard and vine

I love this apple for its defiance. It’s the ultimate winter keeper apple. It is also one of the most balanced apples I’ve had—sweet, acidic, and without the penalty that plagues so many late hangers. The skin isn’t that tough, battlefield-leather armor you get with other winter apples. It’s firm, yes, but fair. The history, its endurance, though, makes it worth having.

It’s the classic social-media reflex: someone posts a leaf with a wrinkle, and five seconds later a stranger hollers leaf curl! as if pronouncing a curse.

They understood that certain transformations only happen slowly, in the cold. That winter isn’t an obstacle but a collaborator. That time itself is a tool, if you know how to wield it. Most modern people try to fight winter. Japan fermented it.

Before sunrise, I walk the wind-cut rows of my winter garden on Orcas, gathering lettuce, kale, and collards for breakfast. As frost clings to the leaves, I’m reminded of my grandfather’s wartime garden—how his acre kept neighbors alive when winter meant scarcity, not inconvenience. That memory becomes a doorway into older worlds where people survived the cold without refrigerators, grocery stores, or modern rescue.

Long after apples are gone and pears are stored away, the medlar still hangs—brown, frost-touched, and waiting. It’s a fruit that sweetens only after the cold, a reminder that not everything worth tasting comes in season.

For millennia, fragrance guided the design of gardens — from Persian courtyards to monastic cloisters. Today it’s often missing. In the Pacific Northwest, restoring scent means designing with intimacy, ecology, and time.

The Native Workhorse Hiding in Plain Sight Across the Pacific Northwest is, Arguably, the Ultimate Species for Edible Landscapes.

From bad plant choices to nightly deer raids, here’s what sinks most first-time gardens.

I love vegetables. I love to eat them. I’ve eaten them on porches and back steps, under summer light and winter cloud. I’ve pulled them from soil I amended by hand. I’ve bent to weed them in heat that wrung the salt from my skin. And still—I don’t grow annuals. Mix of annual and perennial vegetables in the OCS garden. Zone 8b. Pacific Northwest gardening at its best. As a permaculture designer, I’m often asked to build out classic vegetable beds for clients. And I do, becaus

Since the first monastery gardens of Europe, growers have wrestled with the same quiet dilemma—how to fit Eden into a courtyard. The problem is not new. Every walled garden, every cloister orchard, was a study in constraint: soil, sun, and stone dictating what could live together and what must be left out. Space has always been the gardener’s first teacher.