The Naturalist’s Field Notes

The Naturalist’s Field Notes The Naturalist's Field Notes

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In 1988, free trade was called the death knell of the Okanagan w**e industry. More than half the valley's grape growers ...
09/20/2026

In 1988, free trade was called the death knell of the Okanagan w**e industry. More than half the valley's grape growers left, many paid by the government to pull out their vines.

The ones who stayed replanted with varieties like Pinot Noir and Riesling, and built a region.

Field Note No. 76 follows their story to today: rising U.S. tariffs, provinces beginning to open their borders, and the work left before Okanagan w**e is as easy to send to Toronto as to Tokyo.

Link in bio to read the full issue and subscribe.

📷 Photograph by Kaitlyn Krahn · Okanagan W**e Country

A gathering of lupines and thoughts, colour and curiosity woven into form through pen and paper. The quiet essentials of...
09/17/2026

A gathering of lupines and thoughts, colour and curiosity woven into form through pen and paper. The quiet essentials of a naturalist writer.

Regenerative agriculture begins in the soil. But sustainable viticulture depends on the economy built around it.In 1988,...
09/15/2026

Regenerative agriculture begins in the soil. But sustainable viticulture depends on the economy built around it.

In 1988, free trade exposed the Okanagan’s protected w**e industry to American competition, setting off a painful period of vine removal and reinvention.

Growers uprooted vineyards, replanted the valley and began again. From that disruption emerged new varieties, higher standards and one of Canada’s most celebrated w**e regions.

But nearly four decades later, the work of regeneration remains unfinished. For years, a bottle of Okanagan w**e could travel more easily beyond Canada than across its provincial borders.

This week’s Field Note traces the policies that transformed the valley, the growers who rebuilt it and the landmark agreement that may finally open a national market for what they make.

Because restoring the land is only the beginning.

A regenerative economy must create the conditions in which the people who cultivate the land can endure and innovate.

Subscribe to The Naturalist’s Field Notes to receive this issue this Saturday in your inbox.

Photograph by Kaitlyn Krahn · Okanagan W**e Country

Roasted garden roots and freshly harvested lavender.
09/14/2026

Roasted garden roots and freshly harvested lavender.

PIZZA / FRESH PASTA / W**E 🍕🍝🍷The joys of life: restaurant bistro patios in early Autumn.
09/13/2026

PIZZA / FRESH PASTA / W**E 🍕🍝🍷

The joys of life: restaurant bistro patios in early Autumn.

Field Note No. 75: The Price of an Egg's Colour and the Worth of a Valley After WildfireThe Bald Range fire burned 25,16...
09/13/2026

Field Note No. 75: The Price of an Egg's Colour and the Worth of a Valley After Wildfire

The Bald Range fire burned 25,163 hectares in the hills west of Summerland, but the commons were never on the market.

A farmer came back to find his pigs unharmed and his field flock fine, but with losses among the pullets bred to lay blue, green and copper eggs. A gourmet mushroom farm of twelve years burned to the ground, uninsured. A flower grower lost the cold room that carries her blooms to market. Some vines came through, although the fruit may still not be sold because of the smoke.

The hectares were counted. The beauty was not.

What do you hold dear that has never had a price, and what would you spend to defend it?

The flower grower found her greens still growing on the mountain and is selling again. The mushroom farm is selling hats and shirts, and accepting donations toward rebuilding. A chef and a farmer cooked rescued produce into five hundred litres of sauce and put the money back in farmers' hands. Where to buy from them and how to donate is in the issue.

Subscribe to understand the agricultural economy from field to finished product: how we grow, make, design, and build with the living world.

Link in bio.

📸 Photography by Kaitlyn Krahn. Wildfire smoke over an Okanagan vineyard.

Autumn garden chocolate zucchini cake. 🍂🌿
09/11/2026

Autumn garden chocolate zucchini cake. 🍂🌿

Vancouver early autumn mushroom meanderings 🍄There’s always something magical about the first autumn leaves floating dow...
09/10/2026

Vancouver early autumn mushroom meanderings 🍄

There’s always something magical about the first autumn leaves floating down to meet the fungi. I think the world becomes a little better the more time we take to look down. Watch the earth turning beneath our feet. Notice the small miracles in the living world that supports us.

What is a quietly powerful way of reclaiming our attention? 🌾🐝Reading physical books by the great naturalists.Henry Davi...
09/09/2026

What is a quietly powerful way of reclaiming our attention? 🌾🐝

Reading physical books by the great naturalists.

Henry David Thoreau — Walden (1854)

✨ Observation, simplicity, self-reliance, seasons and close attention to place.

John Muir — My First Summer in the Sierra (1911)

✨ One of the loveliest examples of encountering a landscape through sustained observation and wonder.

Charles Darwin — On the Origin of Species (1859)

✨ Patient observation leading to enormous ideas about the living world.

Aldo Leopold — A Sand County Almanac (1949)

✨ Connecting natural history, agriculture, land stewardship and ethics.

Rachel Carson — The Sense of Wonder (1965)

✨A reminder of what becomes possible when we learn to look closely.

The naturalists understood the value of sustained attention. They walked, watched, collected, sketched and wrote. Their work reminds me that good writing begins in much the same way: by looking closely enough at the living world for patterns and relationships to reveal themselves.

That practice is at the heart of The Naturalist’s Field Notes. 🌾📖

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