Sunchokes!

December 30th and the Heat Wave continues. High was over 50 today, so making lemons of my lemonade (I live in Wisconsin because I like Winter) I decided to do some harvesting. Pitchfork in hand I attacked a small portion of one of my three Sunchoke beds. The picture at right is my take-just shy [...]

Comfrey Musings

Now that we are back from our whirlwind holiday tour of the Midwest, I felt it was time to get down to earth on some gardening planning. First off was to map out some plant guilds for the Big Spring Planting. The week before we left I took 6 30 lb rocks and [...]

Solstice

Wishing all of you the joyous hopes and dreams of a new year welcomed in this morn by the return of the Sun. Today is a wonderful time to celebrate the cyclical rhythms of nature: Autumn slipping in spurts to Winter, the waxing and waning of the moon, gold finches turning ashen, the arrival [...]

Guilding the Garden

Recently I was searching for some good reading for breakfast and I stumbled across a much more sophisticated ecological gardening business located in Minneapolis, MN. Besides being significantly more educated in ecology than myself, they are also better marketers-I simply love their garden “products” for the ubiquitous herb spiral and fruit tree guilds. Here [...]

Love. It’s a Burning Thing

We spent last night in the ER, and thankfully everything is fine. But it is times like these that force us to focus on what really matters. To my kids it was that the hospital had free granola bars and unlimited TV, but to me it was family.
The bonds that form in our [...]

Be The Change

I know I am behind the eight ball on this, but my reading is booked thru February and NetFlix had a backlog. So it wasn’t until tonight that we got around to watching The Future of Food. Did I enjoy it? Enjoy might not be the right word, but I can’t think of a better [...]

Insight Update

So Honda discontinued the Insight in September of this year. Though terribly disappointing, with sales a pitiful 1000 cars ytd it is not a shock. I understand that to the typical consumer the benefits of an additional 10mpg over a Prius is not worth giving up the back seat, and that $19k for a commuter [...]

Biomass

I spent much of my environmental life considering cutting down a tree about two steps down from clubbing baby seals. Trees were for planting, growing and hiking under; for habitat restoration, for erosion control, and most importantly for air quality preservation. They certainly weren’t for manufacturing, heating, or any other industrial use. That, along with [...]

Food, Not Lawns

Alright, since it will be 4 months until we know if the Supreme Court is pro humanity or pro Big Oil I figure we should move onto other items. The mail brought several presents today, by far the most interesting was air mailed from Chelsea Green Publishing and included their brand new release: Food, [...]