The grounds

Drip at every planted tree, shrub, row and bed, and sprinklers that lay the dust on the drives and the gravel yards in a dry spell, all from the house well. 13 drip zones and 8 dust zones, each under 12 gallons a minute so the house keeps its water while one runs. The drain field is never watered.

• Drip, by night. A dry week on this sand takes 1.5 in over a grown plant's crown (UW–Madison Extension); a young tree or shrub 5 gallons a week. Each plant gets pressure-compensating emitters 2.5 ft from the trunk, at least two, more for a bigger crown; the close-set spindle apples and the berry rows a dripline down each row; the beds two lines, half their width apart. A grown dry week is 18,459 gallons in 44 hours of the nights.
• The dust. Water lays gravel dust for hours, not days: above 75 % control for about two hours after watering. So the heads run a short pass every two hours from 9 to 5 on a dry day, 2.5 minutes a zone, 209 gallons a pass. A chloride treatment would last months, but the drive runs between the orchard and the cherries, and the Forest Service keeps chlorides 25–30 ft from susceptible plants.
• The heads: 56 pop-up impact sprinklers, 18 ft throws as half circles, head to head. The drive's stand on its east verge throwing west, so the orchard behind them stays dry.
• The winter: polyethylene pipe a foot down, above the frost, blown out each fall before the ground freezes; the backflow assembly comes indoors.
• The limit is the well's yield, 15 gallons a minute: each zone takes no more than 12, so the house keeps the rest while one runs.

• Round the field: dwarf sour cherries from the Saskatchewan program (hardy to zone 2, and they fruit) in a low row that hides the field from the drive; scab-resistant crabapples and a Japanese tree lilac framing the pergola. The familiar Japanese cherries and maples are not hardy in zone 4; the dry garden is gravel and fieldstone from the dig.
• The fruit yard: apples on a hardy semi-dwarf rootstock bred for the north, three rows of raspberries, half-high blueberries in soil taken down to pH 4.5–5.5, haskap, juneberry, aronia, elderberry and currants along its south side.
• The vegetable garden: twelve raised beds for fresh food and winter stores. The four kitchen beds in the court grow herbs and salad greens.
• The bees: three hives at the fruit yard's corner, their entrances to the morning sun, water beside them, and a four-wire electric fence against bears.
• The bath house's screen: a cedar board fence round the tub now, and two staggered rows of native shrubs (red osier, highbush cranberry, nannyberry, hazelnut, ninebark) that read as a screen in three to five years, with white spruce east of it only, since spruce to the south would shade the greenhouse's glazing.
• The rest is native meadow and wood edge: little bluestem, sideoats grama and prairie dropseed with milkweed, bergamot, blazing star and asters, the bees' forage.

In zone 4a, what goes in as sun, rain, well water, compost and sugar comes out as food, oxygen, water vapour and prunings. Five systems, each a year at a time.