If you live in deer tick country, tuck your pants in your socks. I just read in my October Arboretum Newsletterthat the deer tick population there is on the increase. Researchers are on the lookout for these little beasties there, and this past summer they found deer ticks in […]
Lake Sturgeon have been around a long, long time. They were swimming in ancient seas while dinosaurs walked the earth. They are tough, crafty and have survived everything that 150 million years can thrown at them — until the 1860s when humans decided their eggs were a prestigious snack. I […]
I’ve been following Mark Bittman, food writer for the NYT for a few years, and I’ve enjoyed watching him continue emphasizing pragmatic, healthy, tasty cooking choices while turning up the gas on the ethical questions that underlie food from you next snack to the profit and loss report to McDonald’s […]
I have ambivalent feelings about biofuels in general. It doesn’t seem like a magic bullet to me, and I read that putting cropland into biofuel production will likely increase hunger in an increasingly hungry world so that a minority can continue tooling about in their fuel-powered lives. So, I read […]
Here is an article I wrote that appeared this week in Isthmus, Madison’s weekly newspaper: A first-of-its-kind study analyzes how much Madison-area gardeners produce and why Surprise, it’s not just about food! Denise Thornton on Thursday 09/15/2011 When Vincent Smith came to Madison to study urban agriculture, he picked fertile […]
“Hey!” we said. (Watch out for brilliant ideas – they always turn out to be a lot of work.) “While Bruce is here excavating for our septic system, let’s ask him to move a few trees planted by the previous owner, and we can make our future garden plot bigger.” […]
This past week when Doug was mowing around a mound of topsoil to make it more accessible for the excavator, he was stung painfully. We warned the men working on our septic system, but though they dug up and moved that mound, they encountered no bees. Just a few days […]
We are ready to flush our toilet, except that we don’t have one yet. That has to wait till the house is built next summer. However, our drainfield has been planned, approved, laid in, and seeded over. And last week a super-duper septic tank was added to the project. I […]
We are jump-starting next year’s house building project by getting the septic system done this fall. This way we will have good, thick plant cover by the winter of 2012 when we start using it. In places like Wisconsin and Minnesota one has to take care to keep good plant […]
We fell in love with our hilly land, but before we bought it, we were advised to have a soil evaluation report a.k.a. perk test done to see if we would be able to build an at-grade septic system instead of a mound system for our future (now not so […]
Digging in the Driftless 