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 […]
I think I live in bike heaven. There is a bike trail that passes a few blocks from my house in Madison and travels to within a mile of my land in the Driftless Are:a. The Military Ridge Bike Trail runs along the Chicago and Northwestern Rail corridor that […]
ASK NOT FOR WHOM THE REFRIGERATOR HUMS – IT HUMS FOR THEE If your fridge has ever been on the fritz – then you know what a truly handy appliance it is, and how messy life is without it. My grandmother used to tell me how just about everyone in […]
Last Saturday was a day I wait for all year long – The American Solar Energy Society (ASES) National Solar Tour . This great event happens every October, so put the first Saturday of October on your calendar for next year if you want to know more about what solar […]
Guest Post by Della Hansmann Last Friday I wrote a guest post about green building suggesting that one benefit of building bank-free would be to delete those elements from the standard kit of home parts that don’t pertain specifically to your life. I think its very important to design the […]
GUEST POST BY DELLA HANSMANN Last Tuesday, Denise posted about how she and Doug are planning to apply the Goldilocks Principal to their building time line. Rather than build their new home and move into it directly from their existing house in Madison, they are planning to sell their current […]
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 […]
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 […]
Grassroots — Is there any more forceful way to get things done? One engine that has driven the University of Wisconsin for more than 100 years and made it a great (Go Badgers!) institution is the Wisconsin Idea –that education should never be dry or abstract but that it should […]
Digging in the Driftless 