Cackalacky isn’t just a great place to live: Now it’s a zippy sauce for your steak. The versatile Cackalacky condiment, which its Chapel Hill-based inventors pitch as an all-natural dressing, dip and topping, is now available at Greenlife Grocery. Cackalacky corporate isn’t revealing its secret 20-ingredient recipe, but the company will trade a Cackalacky bumper … Read more
Vice President Dick Cheney has his “1 percent rule”; after a recent experience, I formulated my own “5 percent rule.” But while Cheney’s rule pertains to security threats, mine concerns questionable plants in the garden. courtesy Edmund Taylor Questionable plants are those that, for various reasons, aren’t reliable. They may be less hardy, particularly tricky … Read more
Madison’s wonders: Garden writer Edmund Taylor reports, “All of you sophisticates from the big city need to come to the hinterlands of Madison County to see what us yeoman, backwoodsmen and women can do with a pick and a few sticks of dynamite. Believe it or not, Madison has more to offer horticulturally than ramps, … Read more
The first time I went to a Little League baseball game, I swore I would never let my kids know that organized children’s sports even existed. A college student, I was glad I’d brought my knitting. The family I grew up in wasn’t sporty, and as a mother, I saw no reason to spend every … Read more
Earth Day approaches, may the gods help us, and I brace myself for another round of inspiring secular sermons on the uses of electricity and bicycles and permaculture. This year, however, there may actually be some good news in the War on Terra. Woodfin has rejected a low-sulfur-diesel-fired power plant (though the cynic in me … Read more
Local organic farms are becoming a vast minority in the United States. I believe that this is a problem that could affect our children more than the average citizen would think. I grew up in a small town in Vermont, and since I was young, my family and I grew our own food every summer. … Read more
A letter in Mountain Xpress [“Progressively Paving Paradise,” April 4] mentions the need for a moratorium. This would be an opportune time for the city to play catch-up by declaring a moratorium on any further new zoning and development, considering the following circumstances: • Citizen opposition to the present runaway development is very high, [while] … Read more
I commend you for letting different opinions grace your pages, not necessarily all on the left side. However, after reading Jerry Sternberg’s drivel, I decided it was a waste of my precious reading time and will waste it on him no further. His analogies don’t even make sense—like [residents of] nongated communities [“The Gospel According … Read more
The constant clear-cutting along this [West Asheville] neighborhood’s slope has been horrendous. Two-story row homes, on stilts, are being built so potential buyers can view the mountains surrounding downtown. To ensure this, the developer left only one strand of trees at the bottom of the slope. Hundreds of old-growth trees and animal habitats were obliterated. … Read more
Asheville City Council has recently revived a “discussion” topic that was voted down seven years ago: building a racetrack on 51-acres of land adjoining the northern border of Westfeldt Park on Old Fanning Bridge Road, adjacent to the Asheville Regional Airport and directly in the French Broad River basin. What was a bad idea seven … Read more
