So, here is my most recent publication, the cover story for this week’s Isthmus. Researching this piece turned me into a believer in the benefits of whey, and Tera Johnson has made me believe that her whey is best for both my body and my planet. Check it out: Tera […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Guest Post by Doug Hansmann Passive solar has always topped our list of house design priorities, and here in southern Wisconsin, the trick is to capture and store as much solar energy as possible in winter while shunning summer’s overabundance. But designing for moonlight may be a better choice. We […]
We don’t have to rip our mountains apart to power our toasters. A terawatt is equal to one trillion watts, and the sun hits earth with 20 TW. Our biggest power plants produce puny gigawatts of power a small fraction of the terawatts that the sun is bathing the earth […]
This weekend we had a second site visit with our architect/daughter. (Check out Whole Tree Architecture.) She, her boss and his family of four came for the weekend, and the 7 of us (one admittedly still in diapers) got along fine with 2 bathrooms. We had a site visit Saturday […]
In the background of this photo of our just finished hay stack, (see my post Stacking Hay) you can see our barn and the attached greenhouse. Having a greenhouse has been a dream all my life, and when we designed our barn, the attached greenhouse was on the drawing board […]
GUEST POST BY DELLA HANSMANN Lets talk about windows. Let’s talk about light. MORNING WINDOWS Christopher Alexander explored building design by looking for patterns in existing building styles, and he stresses the importance of natural light – eastern light – in the house, and particularly in bedrooms. Pattern 138 in […]
Because our little barn is a timber frame structure covered with slabs of oak weathering to a silvery patina, I like to think it looks like it belongs where it is. (See my post, Building our Timberframe Barn here . But when it was being built, the site looked like […]
Digging in the Driftless 