A crew from Whole Trees Architecture and Construction spent Tuesday and Wednesday on our land and completed peeling all the trees that need peeling this summer to serve as the unmilled timbers we will be using to build our house next spring. Selected not only because they are the right […]
Guest Post by Doug Hansmann With daytime high temperatures staying in the 70s this week, we’re getting a much-appreciated reprieve from what’s been a roasting summer here in Wisconsin. And as Denise and I finalize the orientation of the passive-solar house we intend to build next year, minimizing all possible […]
We had a peeling party on our land this week. Monday through Wednesday there were from six to nine people selecting and prepping the trees that will hold up the house we build next summer. On Monday most of the trees were selected from our 44 acres. (See The First […]
Today was an exciting day. Doug and I cleared overgrown trails and created new ones for the past few days so that today we could walk our woods with Roald Gundersen of Whole Trees Architecture and Construction and with his assistant Della Hansmann, who is designing our house. We were […]
I spent the evening of Independence Day sitting in front of my barn. The sunset was a gift of deep color fanning out across the entire western sky. The crescent moon set through narrow bands of cloud. And then the real show began as the fireflies lifted off from grass […]
After losing our entire first tomato patch to deer last summer, we are focusing our energies on preparing some ground for a future fenced-in garden with cover crops. Last fall we rototilled a bit of land and planted the area in winter rye. This spring at the Midwest Organic Farming […]
8:30 a.m. Feb 25 and I was full up on organic oatmeal, organic raisins and organic milk, leaning forward in my seat at the first of two day’s worth of workshops at the Midwest Organic Farming Conference in La Crosse. I was learning about “Soil Building through Cover Cropping and […]
The absolutely most blood-curdling screams I have ever heard in my life occurred when my 8-year-old daughter and the neighbor kids annoyed some mud wasps. I was outside the house and moving toward the cries before I even knew I was out of my chair. So, though I’ve never been […]
Guest post by Doug Hansmann Denise and I are planning to break ground for our new house 16 moons from now. OK, I could have said we’ll start building on May 20, 2012. It marks the end of the same time period. There is a seemingly endless list of details […]
How are you feeling today? Good? Glad to hear it! How is the wildlife in your area feeling? The U.S.Geological Survey National Wildlife Health Center needs to know, and they have created two new programs to find out. “Avian influenza, SARS, West Nile virus, and rabies are just a few […]
Digging in the Driftless 