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, […]
Let’s here it for Volunteer Environmental Monitoring! Volunteers are our eyes and ears into what is happening in the natural world. With dramatic cuts in government-funded monitoring programs, volunteers have stepped up to the plate. Grassroots environmental groups continue the monitoring that would have to be abandoned if it depended […]
The snow has receded to tiny patches on northern hill slopes. The plates of ice are floating on the mostly-open surface of the pond, and that has freed the Western Chorus Frogs, who began singing three days ago. These are tiny little frogs no bigger than the tip of a […]
Carol King was talking like a geologist when she sang, “I feel the earth move under my feet.” On our land, you don’t have to look very far to hit what I thought until recently was solid rock. When we dug the foundation for our barn, we hit pure white […]
When we first bought our 44 acres, our friends asked when we would build a house on it. They were surprised to here us say at least 5 years. It’s now going on 7, and we are planning to build in 2012. This time frame is being a great chance […]
Food comes from the soil, but where does soil come from? That’s what I’m learning in my first reading assignment of the Training Program for Master Gardener Volunteers. (The University of Wisconsin Extension Master Gardener Program provides extensive, free horticultural training to people,who in turnshare their training for gardening-related projects […]
Our greenhouse growing boxes are almost complete. Seed is ordered, and temperatures of soil and air are getting into the growing range. In our completely passive solar greenhouse, the thermometer 8 inches below the soil surface never registered freezing once all winter long. The inside air temperature once got down […]
Digging in the Driftless 