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 […]
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 […]
So, last weekend my husband, two grown daughters and I settled comfortably into our daughter’s Toyota Corolla (the greenest car among us as present) and motored down to Chicago to refill our spiritual cisterns from the wealth of cultural treasure only a city can amass and to check out some […]
By now, five years into the relationship, I no longer feel it necessary to call my land Ms. Forty-four Acres. Sometimes I feel it’s perfectly appropriate to call her Forty-four, or even Dear old Double F – but that doesn’t mean I actually know her really well yet. Whenever I […]
People say sometimes you can’t see the forest for the trees. It’s even more true that you can’t see the prairie for the grasses. But we really should see those grasses. Ornamental grasses are gaining respect in landscaping, and truly, what is more beautiful than a sea of grass flowing […]
Last Sunday, the sun was shining. The birds were singing. Doug and I were dipping buckets of water from our tiny pond and hauling them in our Powerwagon (learn about the tool that has turned us into superman and wonderwoman here) to all the places we started new plants this […]
I’m hosting far-flung family from Seattle, Houston and Albany this week, so I’m going to post a link today to an article I wrote for the July/August issue of The Organic Broadcaster It begins: We’ve all read the headlines trumpeting the destructive potential of global warming, filled with phrases like […]
If you made your living telling fortunes for evergreen trees, you would not read their palms, you would read the little brown nubs overwintering on the end of each branch. In spring those nubs stretch out to become the tree’s yearly growth. How long they will get is anyone’s guess, […]
Digging in the Driftless 