http://northernwoodlands.org/editors_blog/ en courtney@northernwoodlands.org Copyright 2008 2008-08-21T13:32:15-05:00 http://northernwoodlands.org/outside_story/article/shrine_to_conservation/ http://northernwoodlands.org/outside_story/article/shrine_to_conservation/#When:14:32:15Z Last Saturday, I went down to Woodstock for the 10th anniversary celebration of Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller National Historic Park. The event was also the unveiling of their new Forest Center, a classroom and meeting space made almost entirely from wood harvested on the Park’s 555-acre woodlands. If that last statement raised an eyebrow for you, let me assure you that it’s true. Unlike every other National Park in the nation, Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller practices active forest management. Why would they be harvesting timber from a National Park? Mostly because this national park is the oldest continuously managed forest in America. Forest management began just after the Civil War under the auspices of former owner George Perkins Marsh, author of the seminal environmental text, Man and Nature. His work was continued by Frederick Billings, and subsequently by Billings’ granddaughter Mary and her husband, Laurance Rockefeller. When the forest and mansion was given to the United States by the Rockefellers, the mandate was to continue the long-term forest management. With its century and a half of stewardship behind it, it is a shrine to conservation. Stewardship and conservation of this sort are near and dear to the mission of Northern Woodlands. We are happy to acknowledge there are plenty of places that are fragile and should be off-limits to extractive human activity. Those reserves are important, but we are particularly interested in helping people learn how best to steward the land that can and should be productive. This is also one of the missions of MBR. The Forest Center is the first National Park Service structure to be built entirely with FSC-certified wood. The harvesting was done by Long View Forest Contracting of Charlestown, New Hampshire, and coordinated by Redstart Forestry of Corinth, Vermont. All framing and interior wood used in the Forest Center, including white pine, ash, black cherry, hemlock and red oak, came from the park’s forest. Not just the harvesting, but the construction of the building was accomplished according to the highest standards. The building is being considered for Gold LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) certification by the U.S. Green Building Council. We expect to cover the management of this historic forest in a future article in Northern Woodlands magazine. Until then, I hope this blog piques the interest of anyone interested in the history of forest as practiced in the Northeast. In reflecting on the legacy of which he is such a vital part, Laurance Rockefeller said, “The true importance of Marsh, Billings, and those who follow in their footsteps goes beyond simple stewardship. Their work transcends maintenance. It involves new thought and new action to enhance and enrich…the past. …We cannot rest on the achievements of the past. Rather, each generation must not only be stewards, but activists, innovators, and enrichers.” 2008-08-21T14:32:15-05:00 http://northernwoodlands.org/outside_story/article/renting_the_splitter/ http://northernwoodlands.org/outside_story/article/renting_the_splitter/#When:14:20:57Z 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 mauls and wedges last month couldn’t manage to split even a single bolt of the stuff; some of the bolts were three feet in diameter. After fifteen minutes of flailing, the consensus was to seek mechanical assistance. I couldn’t believe how effective the hydraulic splitter was. Anything we threw at it, it split. We built a ramp out of smaller splits and rolled the monster bolts up onto the carriage. Presto, split. Even gnarled forks and twisted burls gave way before the advancing wedge. After about an hour, we had a cord of the nastiest-looking, torn-apart firewood I’d ever seen. There was no way we could have done that by hand. One of my friends remarked that it was time for us to buy one of the things so that we could use it whenever we wanted to. My thought was somewhat different: if I never use one again, it will be too soon. Why? For openers, I was shot. Lifting or even rolling the bolts up onto the carriage was punishing work, the kind of work that the physical therapy docs never seem to have in mind when they advise you to lift with your legs, keep your back straight, and hold the weight close to your body. They’ve got to be kidding. I spent so much time keeping track of my hands – making sure they weren’t about to be pinched between wood and steel, or wood and wood – that I didn’t think of my back until afterward. (Though I thought about it a lot then.) Beyond that, I’d spent an hour trapped inside ear muffs, my head only a few feet from the belching exhaust port of a two-stroke engine, breathing in the fumes whenever I gasped for breath too close to the plume. Conversation with my compatriots had been impossible, with communication reduced to comical gestures and inscrutable facial expressions. And capping it off, of course, was that we burned through a mess of fossil fuel, even though one of my chief goals in burning firewood is to reduce my use of fossil fuel. We typically burn six cords of firewood per winter. I usually split all of it by hand. The keys for me are that I rarely split for more than 30 minutes at a pop, and I readily toss the crooked forks back into the woods for the fungi to split. I’m happiest whacking at forest-grown rounds that need only one swing of the maul to make them furnace ready, all the while yammering away with friends about politics, gossip, and future plans. The hydraulic splitter strikes me as a perfect metaphor for the role of technology in our society. It’s a tool of brilliant utility that allows us to accomplish the impossible in no time at all. While doing so, it undermines our ideals, diminishes our quality of life, and throws a cloud over the future. I’d love to tell you that I’m never going to rent a hydraulic splitter again. I sincerely hope I won’t. But if another old monster maple falls into the pasture, I’m not sure what the better option is.  2008-08-14T14:20:57-05:00 http://northernwoodlands.org/outside_story/article/notes_from_the_new_guy/ http://northernwoodlands.org/outside_story/article/notes_from_the_new_guy/#When:17:36:07Z 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 family maple sugaring operation (we tap about 2,500 trees). I’m a deer hunter, a trout fisherman and a pig farmer. In my free time I enjoy cutting firewood and making pickles.  Oh, and I’m thrilled to have this new job. I live in Shaftsbury, Vermont, a little town north of Bennington. Geologists call this area the “Valley of Vermont” - a term that refers to all of the flat land that’s sandwiched between the Taconic and Green Mountain ranges. It’s a very different place, physically, than Corinth - where the magazine is based. In Shaftsbury, I stare at substantial peaks (substantial by Vermont standards): Red Mountain (2,850) and Equinox (3,850) to my north and west, Glastenbury (3,750) and Stratton (3,900) to my north and east; but up here, in Corinth, it’s one big network of hills. If you looked down at Orange County, Vermont from an airplane, I bet it would look like a mogul field on a ski slope. But beyond the geological differences, the rural way of life is the same in both towns. People in both places still turn to the woods for respite and peace, for sustenance and fuel. People in both places still see the forest as something familiar - as a part of their lives. This ethos connects every little rural town across the Northeast, and it’s something I’m proud to have in my blood, proud to be a part of.  When you take a new job at a magazine, you’re excited, in a professional sense, to put your fingerprints on the document: to nudge, to influence, to take things in exciting new directions. You wouldn’t take the job otherwise. But fans of the magazine should know that besides this creative ambition, I bring to the job a healthy dose of reverence. Northern Woodlands has been my favorite magazine for many years now, and because of this, my stewardship role is akin to that of a forester entrusted to manage an already healthy, vibrant woodlot. It’s a privilege to join such a fine staff, a privilege to have the opportunity to work with such wonderful writers and photographers. Good editors are invisible. If, over the coming months, this blog is the only reason you know the magazine has changed managing editors, I’ll have done my job well.  2008-07-18T17:36:07-05:00 http://northernwoodlands.org/outside_story/article/what_goes_around_comes_around/ http://northernwoodlands.org/outside_story/article/what_goes_around_comes_around/#When:13:00:00Z 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 bigger – this is our fiftieth year!” Fifty years of high and low markets, fifty years of major changes in the forest products industry, fifty years of building connections with customers and professionals like himself. That’s not to say that he’s been in charge all that time, but his family has been and will continue to into the future, attesting to their good business stewardship practices. When I asked him how he keeps up in a down market, he said it’s based on his confidence in the quality of Northeastern timber and the strong affiliations Gagnon Lumber, Inc. has built. (They belong to the Vermont Woodlands Association, the Vermont Wood Manufacturers Association, the New England Lumberman’s Association, the Vermont Forest Products Association, the National Hardwood Lumber Association, and the Forest Stewardship Council.) He said, “What goes around, comes around. We’re all in this together!” Northern Woodlands is a part of that “we”. As Steve Long writes in the current issue in From the Center, we insist that the magazine be printed at a local press on paper manufactured in the region. This keeps people employed and cuts down on trucking costs that are wasteful – both financially and environmentally. Strictly in terms of dollars, it might be less expensive to produce the magazine elsewhere, but we are committed to the health and well being of the largest continuous forest in the United States and to all of those whose lives are linked to it. Gagnon Lumber and our other advertisers are being joined by NewPage, a new advertiser in Northern Woodlands, appearing for the first time in the autumn issue. Northern Woodlands is printed on paper made at NewPage’s Rumford, Maine, paper mill, and now their advertisement will be printed on paper they manufacture. They have what’s known as triple certification, through the Sustainable Forestry Initiative (SFI), the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), and the Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification (PEFC). Our advertisers help make our work happen. Our work helps them continue in these tough economic times. Together, we help keep this Northern Forest whole. Amy Peberdy is Advertising and Circulation Manager at Northern Woodlands. To contact Amy regarding advertising, call (800) 290-5232, or send email to . 2008-07-11T13:00:00-05:00 http://northernwoodlands.org/outside_story/article/morels/ http://northernwoodlands.org/outside_story/article/morels/#When:20:17:00Z 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 a long trek through the hardwoods looking for these choice mushrooms. They weren’t showing in any of the places I’d found them before, so I tried to cover as much ground as possible, concentrating on hardwood slopes facing east. As I walk, I can see approximately 15 feet of forest floor in either direction, so unless I zig-zag relentlessly through the woods, my 30 foot swath covers only a tiny portion of the available territory. Finding a patch then requires quite a bit of good fortune because they could be anywhere. Two walks a couple of days apart produced nothing, though the dog and I both valued the exercise. Then, on a beastly hot day not long after, I was off on a birding hike of my woods with Vermont Audubon‘s Steve Hagenbuch. Vermont Audubon has a great program where they help landowners evaluate their land as habitat for birds. A walk with a good birder is such a treat, and as we were listening to a hermit thrush and an ovenbird, I came upon 4 morels in an unlikely place, scattered in a patch of almost pure hemlock. Two of them were huge, the largest I’ve ever seen. Which didn’t bother me until I happened to mention those two facts to a mushroom-loving friend, that they were found in hemlocks and they were huge. “Hmmm,” was all she said. Morels are the one mushroom that I know for certain. They are undeniably phallic, they are hollow, and their tops look like brain matter. I couldn’t be wrong. But I have to admit that my friend’s “Hmmm” made me wonder if my wife and I were going to die from eating some previously undocumented huge faux-morels. I remained confident, they were delicious, and we’re still here. And you can bet I’ll go back to the hemlocks next time I’m looking for morels.  Sautéed Morel Mushrooms Ingredients: 1/2 lb fresh morel 1 tablespoon butter 1 garlic clove, minced 1/4 cup chicken broth 1 tablespoon white wine salt and pepper, to taste Directions: Sauté garlic until soft in butter. Add mushrooms and sauté for 2-3 minutes, constantly stirring. Add broth and wine and cook another 2-3 minutes. Add salt and pepper to taste. 2008-06-13T20:17:00-05:00 http://northernwoodlands.org/outside_story/article/farm_forest_and_diesel_fuel/ http://northernwoodlands.org/outside_story/article/farm_forest_and_diesel_fuel/#When:13:00:00Z 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 the woods. Mills are closing, jobs are being lost, and equipment is being sold or repossessed. But over on the farm side of things, our business is doubling this year and slated to double again next year. It could grow significantly faster if I weren’t continuously turning away new business in an effort to find time to sleep. The rising price of oil is a key component of our farm’s success. We’re a small operation, and though we run a diesel tractor (on a 50 percent bio blend) to do the heavy lifting, we plant and harvest by hand. As much as the doubling of diesel prices has hurt us, it’s hurt the big farms (with their inherent need for long-distance trucking) far more. Every new dime added at the pump is a cause for celebration on our farm, since it makes our competitive position better and better. Our farm is also benefiting from the current enthusiasm for locally produced products that is showing up all across the economy, not just in agriculture. Throw in a few food scares (downer beef, E. Coli spinach) and the fact that even those who don’t love vegetables can taste the superiority of freshly picked produce, and we’re in the midst of a golden moment for local agriculture. Which shines an interesting light back onto the difficulties out in the woods. Logging and wood processing is a very fuel-intensive business, and the increased cost of diesel has not bestowed any particular competitive edge on the smaller, local jobber. There’s no real way for the little guy to bring significant quantities of wood to market “by hand.” To the extent that larger equipment uses fuel more efficiently and that larger operators can purchase fuel in bulk, the rising cost of fuel may be putting the smaller jobbers at an increasing disadvantage. Then there’s the fact that, for many consumers, a board is a board is a board, regardless of when or where it was harvested. Unlike a tomato, the difference in quality between products can be harder to perceive, and wood tends to move around the global economy in a way that makes even California lettuce look parochial. Throw in the fact that consumers don’t have to worry about the possible ill-health-effects from eating RoundUp-Ready trees, and the whole “buy local” movement has not penetrated far into the forest-products community in the Northeast. Nevertheless, the downturn in the wood-based economy crept up on me unaware, thanks largely to the portable sawmills just down the road from our farm. The father and son working there sawing pine and hemlock, both for custom jobs and for their retail stacks along the highway, are so busy that I have to get my orders in weeks in advance to insure I’ll be able to put up a new greenhouse on schedule. They’re turning away work right now, too – they have enough sheds, pole barns, and timber frames on the docket to last them until the snow flies, at which point they’ll head back into the woods for more logs. Which makes me think that all is not necessarily lost in the forest-products world. My neighbors are certainly benefiting from the “buy local” ethos, and since they’re largely detached from the global wood economy, they’re insulated from the vagaries of global finances and fortunes. They have less overhead and use less fossil fuel to bring their products to market than the big guys do, and their prices compare quite favorably with those at the big orange box-store down the road. I imagine that oil at $200 a barrel would improve their competitive position as much as it would mine. I admit that, when oil punched through $100 a barrel the first time, I did a little jig on my way out to the fields. Nothing big, mind you – nothing to attract attention. Just a little skip and click of the heels. I’m looking forward to the day when that same click can be heard coming from the heels of logging boots; the sooner we figure out how to bring “buy local” out into the woods, the sooner we can turn the rising cost of diesel into a competitive advantage. 2008-05-23T13:00:00-05:00 http://northernwoodlands.org/outside_story/article/kickin_tires/ http://northernwoodlands.org/outside_story/article/kickin_tires/#When:21:17:00Z 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 certainly wouldn’t have expected that I would enjoy doing it.  Well, we’re off to the Northeastern Forest Products Equipment Exposition Friday and Saturday in Essex Junction, Vermont, and I have to say it’s my favorite show of the year. It’s a great show, well run by the Northeastern Loggers Association. Thousands of people come through, many of them already avid readers of Northern Woodlands, and we love to chat with them and get to know our readers. On breaks, I walk around and get a chance to visit with some of our advertisers and people who have supported our efforts for years. You don’t have to be in the market for a feller-buncher to enjoy the show. Maybe what you’re after is a pruning saw or some wedges for help with your directional felling. You’ll find it there. And you’ll find everything else that has anything to do with working in the woods. And who knows, you might just decide that you need a portable sawmill or a tractor with a logging winch. Go ahead. Come kick some tires. I hope to see you there! 2008-05-08T21:17:00-05:00 http://northernwoodlands.org/outside_story/article/green_up/ http://northernwoodlands.org/outside_story/article/green_up/#When:15:41:00Z 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 part is that it is also the exact day when the curtain goes up on the show we know as Spring. Many signs have already alerted us to this grand opening. Wood frogs have been announcing it for a couple of weeks; the little bright purple splashes of the flowers of beaked hazelnut may by now have faded and shriveled, but the real true Spring arrives in my neighborhood on the first Saturday in May.  As you walk the roads on this fine day, carrying a supply of big plastic bags, the clear yellow of coltsfoot flowers and the vivid green of false hellebore in wet road ditches announce that, truly, it is Spring. No need now to fret over the mental state of the person who tossed that Bud Light can; there are better things to do. Road habitats vary, which keeps things interesting. On the slightly drier sites, trout lily leaves, if not yet the beautiful lilies, cover slopes with their mottled reds and greens, looking indeed the way a fish appears in a clear stream. Red trillium, a bit picky as to where it will live, may be just about to lift and open its flower blossom, the color of raw beef, in hopes of enticing a fly to rummage around and inadvertently do some pollinating.  You may come across a barren stretch, or one with indecipherable green shoots; that’s where you can listen for peepers, or phoebes, or a white-throated sparrow. Looking up from your stoop labor, there might be a tree swallow or that earliest of the warblers, the yellow-rumped. Over the next few months the cast of outdoor characters will be huge. The first Saturday in May is manageable – and delightful. 2008-04-25T15:41:00-05:00 http://northernwoodlands.org/outside_story/article/catherine_tudish/ http://northernwoodlands.org/outside_story/article/catherine_tudish/#When:13:13:00Z 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 that gift of time into a very well-received book of stories called Tenney’s Landing, and now her novel. And then in the midst of all that creative energy, she has taken a position at Dartmouth College, where she teaches literature and fiction writing. She is such a graceful writer and a natural storyteller. She did wonderful work for Northern Woodlands, and it’s fitting that she’s receiving such good notice for her fiction. I love both the story collection and the novel, and so will anyone interested in well-told stories about real people living rural life. Read the review, and see if you can resist picking up a copy of American Cream. 2008-04-18T13:13:00-05:00 http://northernwoodlands.org/outside_story/article/town_forests/ http://northernwoodlands.org/outside_story/article/town_forests/#When:12:31:00Z 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 mixed woodlands, and the “newer,” 301 acres boasting extensive wetlands and calcium-rich soils. Hinesburg’s older town forest started as does a seed: in the spring of 1940, the town’s Selectboard asked Perry Merrill, Vermont’s first state forester, to designate 50 acres for a publicly owned woodland. Since then, the forest has grown dramatically, in both size and significance. In fact, it’s a very model of town forest potential. It has recreation: the mountain-biking trails are so renowned that you can find a video of people riding them on YouTube.  And skiing, hiking, horseback riding, etc. It also serves as an outdoor classroom, both for local teachers and for the University of Vermont, whose students have conducted dozens of projects there. And it has active forest management: Chittenden County Forester Mike Snyder and logging contractor Rocky Martin took a group of us on a tour of the forest, where we saw Mike’s carefully planned marking and Rocky’s low-impact equipment and finished jobs. Mike showed us one small patch cut where Rocky had dropped trees marked for harvest. He pointed to a 10-foot-tall sapling smack in the center of the patch and said, “Do you see the nest in the top of that tree? That was there before Rocky took out the trees. That it’s still there now is the best example I can give to you of his skill.” One of Rocky’s jobs was to harvest white ash, which was then milled and kiln-dried locally and installed to replace the floor of the Hinesburg Town Hall, which had been sanded so many times that the tongue of each tongue-and-groove board was exposed. All this at a total cost of $2.48 per square foot, about what you’d pay commercially. For this effort, the town was awarded the 2007 Tree Steward Award by Governor Douglas. And it doesn’t stop there. The tireless work of the town forest committee, the Hinesburg Land Trust, the Trust for Public Land, the Vermont Land Trust, and the Vermont Town Forest Project has brought into existence the “newer” town forest, a project technically known as the LaPlatte Headwaters Conservation Initiative on Bissonette Farm. The partners had to act quickly and creatively to keep this land, some of the richest farmland in the area, out of the hands of developers. In the end, a combination of state riparian restoration funding, federal funding that resulted from a few lucky breaks (they just happened to find the endangered Indiana Bat on the property, and it also happened to have rare clayplain forest habitat), private donations, and limited, controlled development saved the parcel – a real treasure to the town and the state. Talk about success story. The great thing is, Hinesburg’s only one of many Vermont communities with town forests. Some towns have had forests for years (the first enabling legislation for towns to acquire town forests was passed in 1915). Some towns are just acquiring them – a task made easier by the assistance provided by the Vermont Town Forest Project and by the program they, along with Senator Leahy, were able to stick in the 2007 Farm Bill: the Community Forest and Open Space Conservation Program, which will (if the Farm Bill’s ever passed) provide 50-50 matching grants for towns to acquire town forests. The momentum’s building. Old town forests are being dusted off and looked at in a new light – as providers of essential ecosystem services, as outdoor classrooms, as places of solace and recreational pursuits, and as providers of locally sourced wood products. New town forests are popping up all over the place: take the Brushwood Community Forest in West Fairlee, which, thanks to the great work of Patricia Ayres Crawford (who is, incidentally, taking over Jad Daley’s responsibilities as coordinator of the Vermont Town Forest Project), has been designated top priority for federal Forest Legacy Program funding in Vermont. In a way, the buzz over town forests in Vermont makes it seem like they’re the hot ticket, the greatest thing since sliced bread. And you know what? They kind of are. They’re reminders of a time when people in towns across New England shared farmland and forestland in common – collaborated on their stewardship, made decisions as a group, and reaped the rewards of all that work together. That kind of model doesn’t have to fade into the landscape like an old stone wall. It just needs a renewal – board for board, like an old town hall floor, replaced with thought and care, each board a piece of a tree that was just an eager seedling when the original floor was laid down. It’s time for us to plant the seeds that will become established town forests –sources of clean air and water, of habitat, of refuge, of livelihoods and necessary goods – for our grandchildren. --Anne Margolis For more information on the Vermont Town Forest Project, and to obtain a copy of their new Town Forest Stewardship Guide for communities, visit www.northernforestalliance.org/townforest.htm. More information about urban and community forestry is also available at the Vermont Division of Forestry. 2008-04-07T12:31:00-05:00