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 […]
When you pay for organic milk, what are you paying for? I pick that bottle off the shelf imagining cows grazing in lush pastures, a breeze ruffling their top knots, as they gaze off into the distance thinking calm and cowish thoughts. Those are the cows whose milk I want […]
Everyone has heard about the dark cloud over bee hives. In 2006-07 beekeeping operations lost 45% of their hives, and 2008-09 was no better. Everyone has also heard about the birds and the bees. Pay more attention to the bees. 70 percent of the plants in the world need help […]
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 […]
Geography is destiny, and I got both my geography and my destiny defined a little more clearly yesterday at the University of Wisconsin-Arboretum’s Winter Enrichment Lecture Series. Naturalist extraordinaire Rich Henderson shared his insights about the past, present and future ecology of prairies in Wisconsin. He was speaking from 34 […]
As soon as the first snow accumulates 4 inches, I strap on my snow shoes, and I live in them off still spring. (Well when I’m outside of house and town – and there’s a part of my brain which says that the only time I am really living.) Snow […]
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 […]
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 […]
Digging in the Driftless 