Features - Archive
Page 1 of 9 pages 1 2 3 > Last »
A Damaging Tradition: Diameter-Limit Cutting Diminishes a Woodlot
October 14, 2008
Let me start with a story. Several years ago, a logger showed me the harvesting he was doing on a piece of his family’s property. This was the third time he had harvested this particular piece, and he had noticed each time that the quality of the logs he was getting had markedly decreased from the previous harvest. The first …
↑ top
Hunting Camp
September 10, 2008
When I was a boy of about eight, I used to hunt deer out of a little 12x16 camp that sat up in a bowl on the top of Shatterack Mountain in Rupert, Vermont. My father and Junior Harwood had gone in together on the camp and the woodlot it sat on – 200 acres of northern hardwood forest on …
↑ top
The Root of the Problem
June 01, 2008
As far as trees are concerned, root damage is the root of all evil. Well, most of it, anyway. No matter what symptoms are visible – early fall color (a sign of stress), sudden death of branches, twig dieback, pale or unusual leaf color, slow growth, even some diseases and insect infestations – the problem is likely belowground.
…
↑ top
The Rural Immigration Law
June 01, 2008
↑ top
Woodland Grasses
June 01, 2008
↑ top
The Porcupine’s Palate
June 01, 2008
↑ top
Marking Timber
June 01, 2008
We are easy to spot. Look for boots spattered with blue paint.
Blue paint dots our wool hats in the winter and speckles our hair and baseball caps in the summer. In the fall, because the accumulation of paint turns our once brightly colored orange vests into a strange camouflage, some of us tie orange marking tape to …
↑ top
Rust in Peace
June 01, 2008
“There’s a place called Faraway Meadow
We never shall mow in again,
Or such is the talk at the farmhouse:
The meadow is finished with men.”
--From “The Last Mowing,” by Robert Frost
The steel-wheeled hay elevator, once used for loading loose hay into a wagon now seems out of …
↑ top
The Thunderstorm Mill: Making Lumber the Old-Fashioned Way
March 01, 2008
Water power. Our ancestors, those stalwart souls who headed off into the wilderness to build new settlements, depended on it. They dammed streams and rivers to power the mills that were essential to those early, self-sufficient communities. The flowing water sawed their lumber and ground their grain, and, once the land had been cleared for farming, even kept their milk …
↑ top
North Country Numbers: A New Look at the Forest-Based Economy
March 01, 2008
↑ top
