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Editor's Blog Archive
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Renting the Splitter
We rented a hydraulic splitter last week for processing firewood. It was the first time I’d ever used one.
The task at hand was a nearly two-century-old, field-grown sugar maple that had toppled into a pasture during a thunderstorm last summer. Four tanks of chainsaw gas last autumn had reduced it to stove-length bolts, but three of us working with… (more)
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Notes from the New Guy
Hi! My name’s Dave Mance III. I’m the new Managing Editor at Northern Woodlands magazine, which is to say that I’m the new Anne Margolis (except not quite as organized and, well, a man). I like Russian novels and acoustic guitars. I’m partial to Stihl chainsaws and “green” tractors. I like photographing wildlife. In the springtime I help run a… (more)
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What Goes Around, Comes Around
A lot of you know Ken Gagnon – he’s a real nice guy. He’s got a family-owned mill in Pittsford, Vermont. When I called him recently about renewing his usual ad in the magazine for the upcoming year he replied, “Oh sure, we’ve been in the magazine for a long, long time, and actually I want to make the ad… (more)
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Morels
In years past, I’ve come across nice patches of morels in our woods at the end of May and into June. They seem to respond to a good dose of rain, and a few days after a storm they’ll be popping up through the duff. Word came through the grapevine a week ago that they were out, so I took… (more)
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Farm, Forest, and Diesel Fuel
I live something of a double life: member of the Northern Woodlands team by day and owner/operator of an organic vegetable farm by night. (Time-wise, it’s actually the other way around.)
Recently, as the price of oil has climbed steadily upward, the economic fortunes of my two worlds have started to diverge. Times are genuinely tough in… (more)
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Kickin’ Tires
Back when we started Northern Woodlands (as Vermont Woodlands in 1994), we hardly knew what we were getting in for as far as the business end of it goes. If you had told me I would be going to trade shows and hawking the magazine and all of our other stuff, I would have said you were nuts. And I… (more)
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Green Up
It might seem odd that a person would really and truly enjoy Green-up day. Around here, it’s on the first Saturday in May that people don gloves and walk the roads to pick up the assorted and sometimes unpleasant litter that misbegotten souls have let fly from their cars and trucks over the preceding twelve months.
The redeeming… (more)
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Catherine Tudish
It’s always a treat when one of your alumni makes good. That’s how I felt when I just read a glowing review of Catherine Tudish’s new novel, American Cream.
Catherine worked at Northern Woodlands for about 2 years. She left in 2003, when she was awarded a prestigious grant that allowed her to pursue her fiction writing full-time. Catherine parlayed… (more)
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Town Forests
A few Saturdays ago, I attended the third annual Vermont Town Forest Project summit. It was held in Hinesburg, Vermont, a town that lies about half in the rising, forested slopes of the Green Mountains and half in the flat, fertile Champlain Valley. Hinesburg’s fortunate to own not one but two town forests: the “older,” composed of 837 acres of… (more)
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Forestry Awareness Day
When observers of goings-on at the State House in Albany, New York, recall the events of March 10, 2008, chances are they will remember it as the day the news broke about Eliot Spitzer. They will not remember it as the day that the state's Department of Environmental Conservation announced that it had achieved third party certification (both SFI… (more)