Saturday was workout for the windshield wipers as I drove through fog and rain to Weston’s Antique Apple Orchards in the Prospect Hill Settlement Historic District of New Berlin, Wisconsin. I went to learn how to graft antique apple trees onto modern, semi-dwarf root stock. Weston’s Orchards is one of […]
Yesterday was Doug’s and my 32nd anniversary. It is serendipitous that our anniversary is also Earth Day, but it makes a fantastic reminder of the values that drew us together in the first place. This year we celebrated by planting our raspberry patch. According to Growing Raspberries in Wisconsin, “with […]
Things are getting exciting in our mostly-finished greenhouse! Last year we raced to get the growing beds built and filled before the ground froze. This March we raced again to finish the top edge of the boxes so we could plant. By then the temperatures in the greenhouse were staying […]
Today I’m posting a link to an article I wrote for Isthmus, the weekly newspaper in Madison WI. This was their lead story for the Earth Day issue, and I’m quite proud of it. The long, windowless room is uncomfortably warm and humid. The counters and shelves are filled with […]
Two years ago, while striding up through the woods to the top of our land, my eye fell on some delicate white-petaled flowers growing in the shelter of our biggest oak. I hadn’t noticed them before so I leaned over and looked closer. Then I swore. Garlic mustard! The first […]
I garden like I cook – using a mix of intuition, inspiration, opportunity and random readings. This system works better for cooking, where any totally “out there” idea produces just a single adventure for the taste buds rather than a failed crop for the year. This spring I finally enrolled […]
Green guidelines urge us to recycle and even better reuse. I did just that this week. Doug never throws out a nice piece of wood, and so he kept the old shelf when we redid our coat closet. It was stained that dark color so popular 90 years ago, then […]
April 2. The temperature floated up into the 70s in Madison Wisconsin yesterday. Time to think about spring cleaning. For me its time for more. We are planning the house we will build on our land. It will be a lot smaller than our current house. It’s time to declutter. […]
GUEST POST BY DOUG HANSMANN This month marks the first plantings in the greenhouse Denise and I built on the south wall of our barn. The first, we hope, of many productive growing seasons. The concrete footings for the greenhouse were poured in the summer of 2007 when the barn […]
We call it The Pond, but that term probably evokes a much grander water body than it actually is. The previous owner built a little dam across the end of a ravine and lined the basin with clay from the neighboring field. He never actually found the spring he expected, […]
Digging in the Driftless 