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

The weathered faces reveal lifetimes of adversity. They aren’t human faces; they are the rocky crags that look out over the Mississippi River. Each face is unique and beautiful, full of character. Their expressions change throughout the seasons and even throughout the day, with the nuances of snow and cloud, shadow and sun. The rocky faces of the bluffs reveal layers of limestone and dolomite of the ancient Paleozoic Plateau. This plateau of sedimentary rock was not scraped o

After a fresh snowfall, I go out to see what tracks I find in the woods. I want to see what left a mark. The tracks I see are temporary and short-term marks, but you know who’s been there. There are other marks on the land that tell me who has been there, and if I can read them properly, I can learn a lot. After the snow yesterday, I found lots of squirrel tracks tracing between trees and along the trail. I found smaller canine tracks consistent with coyote, and farther up th

Nature makes quite an impression on me: it gives depth to my life daily, is foundational for our Iowisota venture, and inspires my pottery designs. As we close out our second year of programming at Iowisota, it seems fitting to reflect on some of the things that have “made a mark” (or impression) on us in 2025! Living in the Driftless Area of Northeast Iowa makes an impression on me every day. This photo and the framing clips were taken from the "North Bluff" today, January 1

The 1931 Blackhawk Bridge over the Mississippi River at Lansing, Iowa, is often called iconic. Something “iconic” is a representative symbol, or something widely known or important. This got me thinking about WHY the bridge is iconic. The 1931 Blackhawk Bridge spans the main channel of the Mississippi River between Lansing, Iowa, and Wisconsin. It has been closed to traffic since October and is scheduled controlled collapse/destruction on December 19th, 2025. The bridge is ce

A while back, my daughter observed that her work is an endless series of side quests. Any given day may start with a specific project or objective—call it a quest—but then complications and new facets lead to other activities. Some of the side quests just keep growing to become major adventures. She works at a camp, so it is no surprise that she encounters this often, but I think we all experience this to some degree. A couple of weeks ago, I decided to squeeze in a hike on a

Fall is the time to clean up those loose ends of summer, so they aren’t blowing around in the winds of winter. I’ve been busy with my task list, preparing for the cold, snowy Iowa winter that people keep saying we are due for. One of our tasks is to renew our firewood supply. The woods are full of opportunity; we just need to cut, haul, split and stack it! Thankfully our son Nathan came home for a while and wielded the chainsaw for his dear old parents. A winter day doesn’t g

Shortening days signal the impending arrival of winter, and it seems everyone is heading South. Not me; I have a cozy space by the fire reserved for the coldest of days. But birds and people are on the move. We’ve been watching various stages of migration for several weeks now. In early September, the barn swallows left us. They spent the summer nesting under our balcony, cavorting above the yard, and singing (scolding?!) from the rail. But suddenly they were gone: off to Sou

I went looking for ART in nATuRe, and with a bit of a scramble, I found “une ART”. Une is the French feminine infinitive for “one” or...

This season always brings mixed emotions for me: the excitement of harvesting wild and cultivated foods, the weariness of food...

In a July blog, I talked about latitude that stretched from northeast Iowa to northern Minnesota. In August, we took latitude to a whole...

The origin of “common ground” would logically lie in shared land use; however, the term has always held ideological meaning. Common...

Latitude is “scope for freedom of action or thought”. It is also the “angular distance north or south of the earth’s equator”. Last week...

It seems appropriate to discuss parades on this holiday weekend. A parade is a celebration, with sequential units passing by. Each unit...

We all weigh up risks as we make choices; at least we should! So what is dangerous? What is too  dangerous?? Many of you know that our...

I cannot capture the depth of nature with a single snapshot. The complexity of it all extends beyond what we can see in a glance, there’s...

It begins with the first distinctive call of the sandhill cranes in the slough in March, and the observation of a new arrival every few...