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 […]
We bought our land the weekend before Thanksgiving, and the next summer I walked around with big eyes watching to see what would come up. In a handful of places I saw a single tall, plant. On the edge of a meadow. By the side of our main trail where […]
I’ve been thinking about irrigating as we plan to sink cisterns beside the barn to store rain water. With precipitation starting to come in more intense episodes in the Midwest followed by long dry spells, it seems like the best idea. This press release from UW-Madison writer Jill Sakai takes […]
We’ve been spending about half our time out on our land this summer fighting invasives, finishing the barn and preparing to build a house next year. On a rainy day last week, I opened the door to the greenhouse, which had some overgrown herbs I intended to clear out. I […]
We came across some rough-sawn elm cut to 5/4″ that we thought would work well to make the loft floor in the barn, but it turned out to be only about half the needed number of board feet. Then a good friend kindly offered us some old white oak timbers […]
I went back to school a few years ago and got my masters degree in journalism from the UW-Madison. I graduated with an emphasis in science writing and burning desire to write about environmental topics. I was not surprised when Bryson,’s A Walk in the Woods was assigned reading in […]
A crew from Whole Trees Architecture and Construction spent Tuesday and Wednesday on our land and completed peeling all the trees that need peeling this summer to serve as the unmilled timbers we will be using to build our house next spring. Selected not only because they are the right […]
Guest Post by Doug Hansmann With daytime high temperatures staying in the 70s this week, we’re getting a much-appreciated reprieve from what’s been a roasting summer here in Wisconsin. And as Denise and I finalize the orientation of the passive-solar house we intend to build next year, minimizing all possible […]
Digging in the Driftless 