It is 139 steps from the growing beds in our little lean-to greenhouse to our catchment basin/pond. I counted them Sunday on my fourth (but not last) trip between the two, hauling water to start our fall crop of cold-hardy greens. By the time we build our house, we will […]
This has been a great summer for growing peppers in Wisconsin, and no one knows this better than Dr. David Baumler: by day — a post-doctoral researcher at the Genome Center of Wisconsin, University of Wisconsin-Madison, and by night and weekend — a master pepper gardener. Dr. Baumler spoke on […]
Guest Post by Della Hansmann Last Friday I wrote a guest post about green building suggesting that one benefit of building bank-free would be to delete those elements from the standard kit of home parts that don’t pertain specifically to your life. I think its very important to design the […]
GUEST POST BY DELLA HANSMANN Last Tuesday, Denise posted about how she and Doug are planning to apply the Goldilocks Principal to their building time line. Rather than build their new home and move into it directly from their existing house in Madison, they are planning to sell their current […]
There are so many ways to approach living simply, and all of them seem good. Choosing a minimalist path in our current economy is just going with the flow and finding the fun in frugal. Environmental issues all involve slowing the speed with which we are burning through the resources […]
We did not paint our barn (see my post Don’t Paint — Gray is the New Green ) because it is sided with 1-inch slabs of white oak, which has weathered to a silvery gray and will not rot. But we do have to paint our house in town, which […]
We astonished our friends and family 7 years ago Labor Day weekend when we purchased 44 acres of Driftless Area ridge side that we had first walked only a week before. We wanted to settle on its south-facing slope and care for this bit of land Then we learned, as […]
Our bit of land is nestled into the eastern slope of a tiny bowl-shaped dip in the earth formed where two little valleys intersect, but it has a great big bowl of sky above it. Watching the night sky is easy forget in our hectic, well-lit world, but the perspective […]
The second weekend of our straw bale construction workshop (led by Mark Morgan of Bearpaw Design and Construction ), we got a chance to try earthen clay plastering on the interior walls of the building. The first weekend, we troweled concrete stucco on the outside of the straw bale walls. […]
This year’s harvest is in full swing, and it’s always a mixed bag of crops that surpass my wildest expectations and others that are a real bust. I’m hoping to improve my odds next year. I’ve decided to get the jump on New Year’s Resolutions and start planning for next […]
Digging in the Driftless 