Villa Terra

10/21/2026

What type of planet are you leaving your grandchildren?

The U.S. is the only major economy where planet-warming pollution dramatically increased last year. The United Nations warns the planet is on track for catastrophic warming.

10/19/2026

In 2024 alone, Nebraska landowners improved more than 77,000 acres of prairie. One year, one state, one partnership between ranchers and a small nonprofit.
The Flatwater Free Press has a story out about what’s happening to our grasslands, and buried in it is something worth celebrating. All across Nebraska, people are fighting for the prairie. Ranchers running prescribed burns. The Sandhills Task Force working alongside private landowners. Prairie Plains Resource Institute managing eight prairies. Researchers at UNL keeping Nine-Mile Prairie, one of the last tallgrass remnants in eastern Nebraska, from disappearing.
The challenge is real. Shrubs and trees are creeping into grassland that was open for thousands of years, shading out the native plants underneath. Warmer winters, excess nitrogen, rising CO2, and the loss of the big grazers all play a part.

But here’s what gets me. A photographer with The Nature Conservancy documented over 320 species in a single square meter of prairie over the course of one year. One square meter. That’s the kind of abundance most people drive past at 70 miles an hour without a thought.

And the Sandhills are still about 90% intact. That’s not a loss story. That’s something worth protecting, and people are protecting it right now.
One researcher in the piece said the hardest part isn’t the science. It’s getting people to care.

The state used to be 98% prairie. Agriculture, urban development and heavy grazing changed that.

10/17/2026

The City of Omaha puts out a quarterly newsletter that lands in every mailbox. Paper, ink, postage, trucks. All of it has a footprint, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise.
But I read this quarter’s issue and found out the city is holding a free tire collection day in a couple weeks. I had no idea. Not a clue. And used tires are a genuine environmental headache: they don’t break down, they collect standing water and breed mosquitoes, they catch fire and burn for weeks, and they pile up in ditches and alleys across every city in America.

I don’t have any tires to get rid of. But now I can tell my neighbors who do. And it’s free.

That’s the thing about a printed newsletter. It doesn’t need anyone to follow an account, open an app, or happen across the right post on the right day. It shows up in your hands whether you went looking for it or not.

Recycling rules. Hazardous waste drop-offs. Yard waste. Collection days. Information that only works if people actually see it.

Sometimes spending a little gets you a lot. If one newsletter keeps a few hundred tires out of a ditch, that paper earned its keep.

Read yours. Then tell a neighbor what’s in it.

10/16/2026

Twelve new pawpaw seedlings came home today.

Kurt picked these up to add to what's already growing here. Eleven pawpaw trees in the ground, plus eleven more we started ourselves from seeds saved out of pawpaws we ate in 2025. That part still feels like a small miracle. You eat a piece of fruit, save what's left, and two years later you've got trees.

These twelve aren't staying. The plan is to spread them around town. Parks. Schools. Wherever somebody will say yes to a native fruit tree and keep an eye on it.

Here's what has me excited. Pawpaw is the largest edible fruit native to North America. It grows here without fuss, it feeds pollinators and wildlife, and most people have never tasted one. Custardy, tropical, somewhere between a banana and a mango, growing wild in the Midwest.

Now picture a city with pockets of food forest scattered through it. Not manicured ornamentals that drop nothing but leaves. Actual food, free, in public places, planted by people who thought past their own backyard.

That's not a fantasy. It's just a different answer to the question of what to plant.

Think differently about what you grow. A tree you put in this fall will outlive the argument about whether it was worth it.

Have you ever tasted a pawpaw? Tell me about it below.

09/05/2026

Foraging might be the most eco-friendly way there is to put food on the table. No tilling, no watering, no packaging, no truck hauling it across three states. Just paying attention to what’s already growing.

Picked up another one for the shelf. Edible Wild Plants of the Prairie: An Ethnobotanical Guide by Kelly Kindscher, published by the University Press of Kansas. It came highly recommended and it’s out of print, so I found a copy on eBay.

That’s a tip worth passing along. Some of the best foraging books ever written aren’t being printed anymore. eBay and Etsy are full of them, often for a few dollars. The regional guides especially, the ones written by people who spent decades walking a particular prairie, tend to be more useful than anything newer and glossier. This one is about our prairie. Not somebody else’s woods a thousand miles east.

My foraging library keeps growing. I’m nowhere near an expert. But I’m enjoying the learning, and I’ll keep sharing what I find along the way.

The people who lived on this land long before us knew how to read a landscape and eat from it. That knowledge didn’t disappear. It’s still out there in books like this one, and in the plants themselves, waiting for anyone willing to go look.

What’s the best foraging book on your shelf? I’m always taking recommendations.

08/26/2026

07/12/2026

Solar panels for pennies on the dollar? ☀️⚡️🔌🔋 Yes, that is a real thing on Facebook Marketplace right now, and today is a perfect example why it’s worth checking.

Luna Verde is officially standing, and now the real work begins. We are turning it into the new headquarters for Benson Community Garden and my own art studio. Today I found 280 watt commercial grade solar panels on Marketplace, barely used and mostly kept in storage, for just 55 dollars each. Three panels should be plenty to keep Luna Verde powered year round. Total cost: 165 dollars. That is an unbelievable deal for equipment this solid.

I liked the deal so much I grabbed two more for myself.

Solar just makes sense here. It is clean, efficient, and Omaha actually ranks quite high for solar potential. And part of the appeal for me is just the science of it. Watching sunlight turn into usable power never stops feeling a little bit magical. I love learning how things work, and solar gives me that nerdy kind of happiness every time.

If you have been thinking about solar, keep an eye on Marketplace. Deals like this show up more than you would think.

06/03/2026

This level of waste is not sustainable. We can do better. We must.
🚯♻️💚🌎

A system that creates an unmanageable amount of waste is NOT an efficient system. We need to reward companies for sustainability, not short-term greed that hurts us all in the long run.

06/01/2026

Another resource for native plants!
🌱🌾💚

For a plant that grows naturally on the Midwest prairies, significant effort goes into starting native grasses and flowers in a greenhouse.

05/29/2026

We have a reservation for the upcoming Slate Auto pickup, sharing use with the Benson Community Garden. What a beautiful, simple design for an affordable EV. This will be a BIG difference maker for the organization.

Take a look at my Slate!