When you decide to build something, these days you have a choice of four primary building materials : Steel Concrete Processed Wood Wooden timbers Which one would you guess is the most sustainable? Unmilled timbers are what we using to build our house, which is currently a tiny subset of […]
No matter where you sit down to your Thanksgiving meal this Thursday, your cranberries may well have been grown in Wisconsin. We produce more cranberries here than any other state. Cranberries were grown here before Wisconsin achieved statehood in 1830. Your cranberries may have come from one of 13 commercial […]
Lisa P. Jackson, Obama’s administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency spoke at UW-Madison campus this week, and I pedaled down to campus to hear her. Jackson’s visit to Madison could be considered something of a pilgrimage. Her job and all the main environmental protection laws grew out of the Earth […]
To live sustainably, we have to learn how to use the sun’s energy in real time – the way people used to do it before we began to depend on the super-charged sun power of fossil fuels. Some solutions are high tech like solar panels and some solutions are low […]
We all know trees are essential to our survival. Trees produce oxygen. The big oak in my backyard is producing enough oxygen for 10 people to breath. Trees clean the soil. Phytoremediation –That’s a mouthful of sylables we depend on. Trees are carbon sinks, locking up carbon and keeping it […]
It looks like we may be excavating the building site and pouring part of our foundation within a few weeks! This will be the third time we have ripped open the earth, and each time feels traumatic when the bulldozers and backhoes have at it. We had to dig into […]
I LOVE BIKING! But I put my bike away when it starts to snow in Wisconsin. I see people who pedal through till spring, and I salute them, but there is something I don’t like about a biker’s odds in snow. The pavement gets slippery, and the roads become narrower […]
When you think of wild animals, which one scares you most? A cougar? A wolf pack? A grisley bear? A badger? (Go Badgers!) What scars me most is a white tail deer. That’s right – Bambi strikes fear in my heart. I’m not alone. A 1992 USDA national survey targeted […]
Here’s an article by Jill Saka that relates the incidence of deer ticks to the presence of honeysuckle — one of the most fierce and destructive invasives in our woodlands. I have only taken a casual swipe at the honeysuckle on my property yet, but this article is more than […]
Last weekend we got to visit the Whole Tree Construction, straw bale house that we helped build last year. Doug and I participated in a 6-day strawbale, clay wall workshop. (See posts Straw bale – Bending Walls , Stitching Straw Bales Makes Strong Walls, and Earthen Clay on Straw Bales […]
Digging in the Driftless 