If you made your living telling fortunes for evergreen trees, you would not read their palms, you would read the little brown nubs overwintering on the end of each branch. In spring those nubs stretch out to become the tree’s yearly growth. How long they will get is anyone’s guess, […]
I didn’t learn about Conifer sex till it smacked me in the face. Our land has 22 acres of teenage pines and spruces as part of a certified tree farm, so how did I fail to notice what was going on sooner? I have been walking among them, cutting out […]
As we fill in our mental map of this 44 acres, we tend toward descriptive names that don’t take too long to say: High Pines, Windward Spruces, Lloyd’s Lane, Westfallia, the Prairie, the Glade, Turkey Track Trail, Ridgeway. Most of these names came immediately to mind and stuck like glue. […]
So, there I was Saturday, crouching in the woods under the oldest oak on our land, squinting hard at the ground so I wouldn’t miss a single tiny white flower cluster, pulling them out by the root, biting off the top half of each plant and eating it on the […]
Hey, we all need things to be easy once in a while. The list of things we could/should do everyday to turn the tide of global climate change can be intimidating. Most of them are a big commitment to lifestyle change. But you can also make changes while lounging at […]
Who What When Where Why How The Prime Directive is how to take care of and live on this land with the smallest feasible footprint. Notice I say feasible, not possible. (We’ve taken living in a pup tent and farming with a machete off the table – only Cinderella can […]
Who What When Where Why How The Midwest Driftless Area is a glorious place. Trout Unlimited calls it a national treasure and has pinned its scaly dreams on restoring the streams that trace its deep, convoluted valleys. This dramatic landscape, carved deep by ancient water courses, is far older than […]
A Rough Site Plan for 2012 When we set out to find land in the Driftless Area of Wisconsin, we imagined moving into an old farm house. What we fell for was 44 acres with a south-facing slope that looked to be a promising house site where we would become […]
I was walking up Lloyd’s Lane when I saw something vividly yellow peaking out of the green stuff. (We hadn’t had our 44 acres very long, and it was all pretty much green stuff then.) We investigated and discovered a Yellow Lady Slipper bursting out of the earth. Of the […]
Who What When Where Why How So, who is telling you this? My daughter, a budding green architect, recently described me as an unreconstructed hippy venting my pioneer woman leanings through conservation biology. !!! And now I see that she has just posted about my blog on her blog Lost […]
Digging in the Driftless 