About

This blog is anchored in the 44 acres of Wisconsin’s Driftless Area that my husband and I fell in love with seven years ago.

We have been catapulted into a crash course on identifying and protecting its complex ecosystems, figuring out how to fit ourselves in with the smallest possible footprint while exploring how to turn some of the acres to sustainable farming and contribute to the local food supply.

This blog unearths  our research, hands-on experience and musings including:

• Prairie restoration
• Green architecture
• Gardening
• Small scale sustainable farming
• Vegetarian and locavore lifestyle
• Understanding and responding to climate change

We have built a little timber frame barn from which we stage our projects.

Our most exhilarating project at present is planning and building a sustainable dwelling on the land with Della Hansmann, our daughter, an architect with Whole Trees – Architecture and Construction, you may have seen written up in the New York Times last year.

The house will incorporate

• unmilled, whole tree timber frame
• straw bale and living roof
• passive solar design
• cutting edge solar hot water infloor  heat
• slipform stone walls using rock from a local quarry

WE BROKE GROUND IN MARCH AND THE JOURNEY IS UNDERWAY!

Della sometimes supplies a guest post on elements of whole tree architecture.

Doug who started as  my silent partner in this blog, providing useful suggestions and editing, and is now contributing posts of his own.  Doug’s yin (a PhD-trained sense of scientific inquiry) and my yang (master’s degree in environmental journalism voracious curiosity) seem to be a good balance for this blog (and in life).

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