Uprooted, an eco/travel blog

Yesterday I told you all about Farmer John’s struggle to save his family’s farm and preserve his unique identity (The Real Dirt on American Counterculture: How Farmer John made ideals come true).
From a family farm, the place has grown a lot. These days, Angelic Organics does a lot of education, from on-farm training to urban [...]

I’d never seen a Great Lake before. “They’re huge,” people had told me. “You can’t see across them.” But that still didn’t prepare me for visiting one in person.
We drove up to the Indiana Dunes State Park, an expanse of protected shore along Lake Michigan. We were hoping to find a spot to camp, but [...]

I left something out of my previous post: two photos, featuring the young man who won the Chicken Shit Bingo game. Thought you’d enjoy them.
Happy 4th of July! It doesn’t get more American than this:

Chicken Shit Bingo is pretty straightforward. As a matter of fact, once your eyes adjust to the dimness of Ginny’s Little Longhorn Saloon, you pretty much can’t miss the game.
The bar is small, hot, and packed with Lone-Star-sippin’ Texans. Directly inside the entrance is a pool table with a bitchin’ NASCAR lamp hanging above it, [...]

Compared to the North or the West, Texas smells. It’s not an unpleasant odor, but it’s unmistakeable: wafting up from the springy earth, a mix of decay and new life. A fertile smell, fecund: the smell of a marshland barely contained. Which, of course, Austin is.
The warm night air, as the evening winds pick up, [...]

It started out innocently enough: it was a sunny Friday afternoon, and everybody at Zephyros was ready for a break from work. On Fridays, most of Paonia heads to Revolution Brewing. Daphne and all the interns (except Siwar, who was too young and therefore tasked with cooking dinner) hopped in the Subaru to go have [...]

photo by Karina Salinas Heredia

When I was in third grade or so, my class visited a local farm. I didn’t learn a lot that day, not exactly: mostly what I recall is the smell of hay&manure, and the big scary turkeys clucking at me through a fence. Still, it brought the idea of a farm [...]

Last Sunday, I arrived at Zephyros Farm and Garden, where I’ll be staying and working for a couple of weeks.

Right off the bat, I knew I’d love this place. 35 acres of organic, healthy goodness: Zephyros abounds with beautiful veggies, scampering lambs, mouthy goats, budding blooms, and one big black dog called Ullur who spends [...]