Farm Plants in Wisconsin at the Carlson Farm

Salad Bar

The pasture is in bloom right now. Purple, yellow, white, and a million shades of green and gold. Life buzzes and jumps and dances in the thick growth. It is fragrant and alive. I love seeing this landscape when we walk out here, it lines the gravel road all the way to the paved highway too. This is food. This food is feeding more food. It is lush and everywhere. It is also medicine. How glorious that this biology and ecology is thick and over growing all around us.

It baffles me that there is an industry that is solely focused on eliminating and poisoning these plants because technically they are all "weeds".  This makes no sense to me at all. People mow and poison this animal salad bar to clear the way to grow corn to then feed those same animals that would be healthier if they ate this natural prairie food- and we would be healthier eating the animal that feasted on this green goodness too. Or they clear it away just to have lawn. Lawn.

That is why our pastures look like this.  Messy and colourful and wonderful. Good for the bees, for the birds, for all of us. Our small patch on the quilt that is Iowa is going to be the crazy one. That's who we are, outliers, always.

I would not have it any other way.

Pictures of our trip, a preview of the posts to come.

We travelled to Wisconsin to a Permaculture Convergence. Pictured below is our campsite and view, learning to use a laser level for planning swales and keyline field trenches, and the excavator starting to move earth.