Today as I write, it is a humid 96 degrees outside, one of the quintessential “dog days of summer”. In the far reaches of my memory, a step outdoors takes me back decades to running barefoot through the sprinkler, eating frozen popsicles, and dreading the imminent return to school. The song of the cicadas reminds me that these days will not last for long. The “Dog Days of Summer” are traditionally the 40 days from July 3 to August 11 when the Dog Star, Sirius, rises and set

We usually think of being “disturbed” as a bad thing, but perhaps I should differentiate between disturbance as a mental state vs ecological disturbance in nature. Many of my favorite foraged plants grow in places that are disturbed. I’ve touched on ecological disturbance in some of my other recent blogs, so I’ll keep today’s note brief. But there are so many tasty “weeds” out there right now because of disturbance, I must say a few words about them! Often our garden weeds or

Here at Iowisota, nestled between bluffs along the backwaters of the Mississippi River, I’m surrounded by wild things. And I love it. There are new surprises daily, some of them delightful, some not-so-much. The season of wild berries has come upon us quickly. I’m enjoying wild blackcap raspberries and wild gooseberries; they are abundant enough this year that I’ve even been able to beat the birds to as many as I want. I see quite a few wild grapes forming; we will see if any

I wrote part 1 on a snowy day in January, about how tracks and marks left behind tell a story. I promised to follow up with a more in-depth discussion of how past management and activities shape the plants on the landscape. The forest cover at Iowisota is vastly different now than it was 95 years ago, due not only to the passage of time, but also due to the actions that were (or weren’t) done on the land during that time. I’m going to talk about several types of vegetation, h