I have a clump of dirt on my sideboard but I’m not washing it off. It’s a handful of the topsoil we just had delivered to our land for the septic system drain field and garden beds, and it’s my prized possession. I feel like I dodged a major guilt […]
I have come upon fawns lying still as statues in a stand of grass on our land. Their survival strategy seems to be to freeze, allowing me to walk right up and study their perfect ears, finely chiseled hooves and delicately dappled camo patterns. Baby animals always bring out our […]
Before we build a house on our land, we will need a septic system. The land has already passed its perc test (Doesn’t that sound cheerful? It’s 6 a.m., and at the moment, I’m not sure I feel perky enough to pass any test.) Our land is not only perky– […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 