Petunia Valley

Reading Time: 3 minutes In the middle of August, my neighbour Vern Bunton and his son were leaning on the box of my half-ton down by the mailbox enjoying a visit, when I made a polite remark about the lovely crop of beans young Matthew had grown on 50 acres across the road. This was Matthew’s first crop and […] Read more

Reading Time: 3 minutes My grandfather was a part-time medical doctor and a full-time food nut. He’s been gone for 40 years now but I still think of him pretty much every time I open the fridge. He hopped from one loony idea to another over the course of his career, lecturing his patients and every member of his […] Read more

Reading Time: 3 minutes I have a tech-savvy neighbour, Sully, who jets across the continent every week advising corporate moguls about social media in the Age of Information. Quite frequently, Sully and his gorgeous young wife Sophie take a drive up the Petunia Valley Sideroad (which we affectionately refer to as the off-ramp of the information highway) and join […] Read more

Reading Time: 3 minutes I took the family to one of the neighbourhood parties at the Fisher place down on the River Road over the holidays. It was a pretty typical mix of farm and small-town families. The men stood in the heated garage, holding beers and moaning about the price of pinto beans and foliar fungicides. The women […] Read more

Reading Time: 3 minutes In the same way that spring produces the first gin and tonic moments on the veranda and frog songs that waft up from the marsh in the evening, it also produces two famous lists on the fridge: those things which must be done and another that fantasizes what might be done if we had the […] Read more

Reading Time: 3 minutes Many years ago, my wife picked up a cast-iron, hand-cranked corn sheller at an auction, just about the same time Bob Pargeter passed over his cornfield next door with his new combine. I noticed there were all sorts of intact corncobs lying on the ground at the corners of the fields where the machine turned […] Read more