Today's fresh, wild salad pick. I wouldn’t put it pasta me to do a cormy play on words… but every time I step out my back door, it seems that the landscape has suddenly erupted into a green carpet of salad! All the pictures here were taken this week at Iowisota. So many of our early Spring plants double as salad greens, so let me introduce you to a few of my favorites! The young tender leaves of cutleaf coneflower/sochan ( Rudbeckia laciniata ) serve as a mild salad green. Th

We like our tasty mushrooms, but fungi need to eat too. Their food source is usually dead or living plant material. Many of our choice edible mushrooms decay wood to get their nutrition. Some also have mycorrhizal relationships with specific plants, in which the plants benefit from getting nutrients from the fungus and the fungus benefits by getting sugars/food from the plant. I simplified the explanation, but this relationship is one form mutualism or symbiosis. Sometimes th

Spring is such a sweet season, in so many ways. Maple syrup is only part of the story! A challenging part of maple syrup season is determining the timing: Is it time to tap yet? When will sap run? Am I too early, or am I missing out? I put my first few taps out around February 10 th , and we’ve been through 3 Springs and 2 Winters since then! We’ve had several fluctuating periods of good sap flow and no sap flow. Natural systems are complex, with many factors. Spring sap flow

In ecology, we often talk about the “overwintering state” of insects, animals, plants, and other living things. As we approach the end of February and Spring is on the horizon, I think perhaps it is not too depressing to talk about overwintering. We’ve almost made it, although Thursday night’s surprise 11” snowfall may have brought some doubts. We woke Friday morning to discover that the predicted 3-5" of Spring snow had burgeoned to 11" and turned northeast Iowa into a winte