I like to spend Mothers Day communing with Mother Nature and planting. I used to content myself with converting our lawn into flower beds, but now Doug and I focus on plants that recreate the diversity of a natural community on our 44 acres. For Mothers day, we got 54 […]
It’s déjà vu all over again. Last year we spent weeks watching a pair of geese nest on the tiny island of our pond. When we went out to our land at the time I calculated the young should be hatched – they were gone. Vanished. We feared predators. This […]
I always love the drive to our land, getting closer and closer as the highway skims the top edge of the long, high Military Ridge that shows up on every topographical map of Wisconsin till we turn south onto the country lane and drop into our little valley. It’s a […]
I love going to the farmers market and buying fresh produce, bringing it home and eating it as close to immediately as makes sense. But I would not like to be on the other side of the equation – the farmer who has poured so much resource and labor into […]
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 […]
Digging in the Driftless 