This past Saturday morning, Kathie, Susan, and I joined Denny Connor's work party at Mazo Bluff. Denny has made great progress in opening up more of this nice prairie remnant,…

Seed collecting is an important part of our restoration activities, and this is the time of year when we are pulling together all of the collections. Kathie is in charge,…

We were delighted to receive the December 2010 issue of Wisconsin Natural Resources and discover that our Pleasant Valley Conservancy was featured on the back cover of the magazine. A…

Yesterday our crew spent the whole day at Black Earth Rettenmund Prairie basal barking brush: sumac, grape, raspberries (mostly black), honeysuckle, buckthorn, gray dogwood. The weather was surprisingly fine and…

For the past several weeks, whenever we can scare up some time from other tasks (such as seed collecting), we have been working on buckthorn control. This is a good…

The weather finally cooperated and we were able to do the large burn of the north woods. Fall burns are tricky, because the days are short, the temperatures are lower,…

We had a nice day at Black Earth Rettenmund Prairie killing sumac. Five volunteers spent three hours. Now that most of the clones have been knocked back, we are relying…

I was at the top of our ridge Tuesday and got a good look at what the beavers are doing to our wetland. Their two dams along Pleasant Valley Creek…

The production by plants of chemicals that inhibit growth of other plants is called allelopathy, and is surprisingly common. Among species that exhibit this phenomenon are those of the genus…

We are planning to burn the north woods sometime in the next few weeks (depending on weather), and yesterday our crew (Amanda, Marci, and Susan) spent most of the day…