Happy Dancing Blog

It’s important to remember that your garden is also likely under the effects of the heat. Let’s review what you can do to help keep your soil and little green buddies happy and thriving in the hot summer months

This summer I decided to set a simple goal: walk to and from work as often as possible.

As most of our regular readers know, I, along with my wife Audra, own and operate Island Lake Farm, located east of Brainerd. It is a diverse farm operation with an abundance of different products, from various fruits, nuts, syrup, and lumber grown as part of our agroforestry systems, to livestock and veggies grown for market. Water quality certification is another step Island Lake Farm took for conservation. Photo by Minnesota Water Quality staff With a mission of using ec

As June 8 - World Ocean Day - approaches, it’s easy to feel that as a Midwesterner living very far from the ocean, our actions don’t have impacts on that ecosystem, but that couldn’t be further from the truth.

There are many good steps to take to assist turtles, especially in the spring

It’s fire season again, as are most spring seasons in the Midwest. This time the wakeup call came closer to the Northern Lakes campus of Happy Dancing Turtle in Pine River in May 2026. Wildfires are a concern statewide. The 1600-acre Flanders fire burned in Mission township in north central Crow Wing County. Flanders Lake sits on the western end of several thousand acres of publicly owned land. That land surrounds the Pine River, just before it enters the Mississippi River. M