The blueberries are waking up! Come give them a little tender loving care to start the year out right.

Tasks include:

- Making the brand new mulch look nice

- Clear errant prunings out of the field

- Lay out the irrigation lines

- Observe, acknowledge, and imagine

One free Pick Your Own Pound, just for showing up.

Meet at the blueberry patch, you know where to find it.

A new music fest for the Greater Spring Green Metropolitan Area. Four famous musicians to choose from. A participatory music making experience. Perform with your friends, or put your name in the hat to play a song with the house band, or make a request as a listener. More information to come. Contact to participate.

Reek Sunday 2024

A full day of activities at Twin Crix!

Farm Work Party: 9am - 1pm. Planting trees out in the Back Four orchard. Come and be a part of the story of the farm! Work clothes, gloves, water, and bug spray recommended.

Taliesin Landscape Walk with Gary Zimmer: Meet at 2pm at the Frank Lloyd Wright Visitor Center, see here for more information and tickets ($15, kids free).

Free-Grazed Blueberries: 4-6pm. Come see what all the fuss is about and taste the different varieties. Pick your own pounds also available.

This is it - the Big Day. Birding’s Super Bowl. This is why we do it! This is why we watch the birds. This is why we get out of bed in the morning.

OK maybe not, but the Big Day is often at the peak of bird migration, which is exciting. Anyone could be here, flaunting their exuberance, cacophonous in dawn chorus. This year’s activity: try to identify all of the birds on the farm on the Big Day. We’ll start the day before the day starts, when the birds are just brewing up the beginnings of their feverish crescendo and dawn approaches. A great time to engage in birding by ear. Then, throughout the day, we’ll go on loops through portions of the farm and see what we see and hear what we hear. Come out for a scheduled loop or for a free range walk of your own.

New to birding? That’s even better! You get the opportunity to learn a thing or two from an enthusiast, including how to find a bird in binoculars and how to onomatopoeize bird sounds into memorable and inane quips. 

Birding Farm Walk Times:

5:00am

7:00am

11:00am

2:00pm

3:00pm

5:00pm

7:00pm

11:00pm

Each walk goes off to check one or more sections of the farm, and note the birds that are present. At the end of the day, we'll have a total and thorough bird list. I bet we'll hear some owls on the 11:00pm walk.

Binoculars encouraged, apps permitted, presence anticipated.

Address is:

6679 State Road 23

Spring Green, WI 53588

RSVP not required, but observed with interest.

Back in 2023, I planted the first acre of the Back Four. Apples, pears, peaches, plums, and cherries, two hundred sapling rootstocks to be grafted later. Later, in the summer, I acquired twigs of new growth from desired fruit varieties to use as scion, and set to grafting. 

I approached a sapling rootstock, now settled from several months under the good sun in its permanent home in the Back Four, and cut a small, T-shaped incision through the bark. I then cut a single bud off the tender new growth of the scion twig, and carefully slid it into the incision. Working quickly, lest the flowing plumbing of the plant cells dry out, I tied on tension with rubber and wrapped tightly with impermeable tape. The deed was done. 

Sealed under the tape were two separate genetic individuals, their boundaries built for flowing water, now open and leaking, now pressed into contact with each other. Hopefully, from my perspective, they would each engage extreme efforts to Heal This Wound, repairing contiguous cellular connection flowing through and within themselves, making themselves entire once more, making themselves into itself.

So let’s go see if that actually happened!

Meet at the barn at 10am. We’ll talk about grafting and learn a thing or two from a self-styled modestly informed amateur. Then we’ll take a walk out to the Back Four (half a mile, mostly flat and drivable) and inspect the trees. We’ll take some notes, and perhaps perform some spring grafting techniques with new scion to get more of the trees started on their compound journey.

Also: 

May I suggest pairing this with a visit to Phoebe Point, the newly opened segment of the Driftless Trail? The organizations responsible for the trail are having an opening celebration on Sunday afternoon. If you’ve volunteered on the trail building efforts, as I have, or if you plan to volunteer on any of the regular Driftless Trail work days coming up this summer, as I do, then come celebrate this opening at 2pm! We can carpool over (parking is limited), or heck, you can walk - it’s only a little over a mile to the trailhead.