Immigration - fears and hopes

Immigration seems one of those issues where everyone talks in code, and the real issues aren't on the table.

I bumped into the immigration issue some years ago while speaking at an international environmental law conference. Wanting an update, I sat in on one of the sessions on 'population'. I felt I had walked into an alien world. Piles of literature were jammed into our hands as we entered the meeting room. Every seat was covered with competing tracts and fact sheets. Speakers were stridently objecting that opposing speakers were given a minute more time than them. People intent on stuffing our ears with information talked so fast as to be unintelligible. The human energy in the room was so twisted that it was all I could do to keep from bolting for the door. But I was fascinated by what was going on.

Seed Saving

If you grow chives or peas in your garden, it's time now to save the seeds. Very soon the same will be true for your spring salad plants, lettuce and spinach, unless you already pulled those up because they've "bolted."

When salad plants begin to shoot up from the center and the leaves go bitter, most gardeners, looking to keep things tidy, pull them up and thus never see the latter half of the plants' existence—the rising up and flowering of the middle stalk, the fading of the flowers and the development of the seeds. Finally the plant will shed those thousands of seeds and volunteer plants of the same kind will come up, more or less ad infinitum. With human intervention, however, by shaking the seed stalk into a clean bucket we can gather enough seeds such that we'll never have to buy them again.

Ten years ago, during my second season as grower at the Seeking Common Ground CSA in Rochester, New York, we were feeding 100 families. At high season this meant 1,000 pounds of produce transported from garden to barn, harvested, cleaned, sorted...