Ever wonder how Bugs Bunny always cleaned Elmer Fudd’s clock? Which one was eating carrots? Those brilliant orange, satisfyingly crunchy roots power packed with carotene are actually a newcomer in the 12,000-year-old world of agriculture. Carrots are a domesticated form of Queen Anne’s lace, and have been traced back to […]
There is a low mist in the wood – It is a good day to study lichens Henry D. Thoreau January is Bark Appreciation Month. It’s the time when the earthy gray blue and ochre patches of lichen become vivid accent colors. Snowshoeing in Governor Dodge Park last Sunday, I […]
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 […]
When we see the video of polar bears pacing on a shrinking ice flow, we feel both empathy for the poor brutes and relief that the warming poles and their grisly realities are a long way from us. I have been guilty of the smug feeling that, here in Wisconsin, […]
Obi-Wan Kenobi called Mos Eisley a wretched hive of scum and villainy, but I’ll bet that’s just because they hadn’t discovered any sodium bicarbonate on Tatooine. We are SO lucky to have plenty of baking soda on Planet Earth. According to Planetgreen, there are 17,000 petrochemicals available for home use […]
Both our girls made it home for Christmas. We lit some candles and exchanged a few presents on Christmas Eve. The highlight is a custom we picked up in the Netherlands, where the present exchange came with quirky, poems that hint at the object inside the wrappings and tease the […]
We raced to finish our greenhouse project before the ground froze and the snow fell. By last week the ground was frozen, and Wednesday the snow not only fell, it dumped. Wednesday the city of Madison was stopped in it’s tracks. With about 17 inches of snow and gusting wind, […]
18 years ago I drove my shovel into the ground of my new yard in Libertyville IL and broke the blade off in that rock-hard clay. I replaced the shovel, and while I was at it I bought a big, black, plastic compost bin so I could compost urbanely. By […]
Digging in the Driftless 