Articles

A huge mound of vines, 8 feet wide by a dozen yards long, lay baking in the August sun. The effort required to cut all those vines by hand, drag them out of the woods, and pile them up to dry…

Although apple scab is everywhere all the time, it is most apparent in the fall, as we try to avoid apples spotted with its telltale, ugly, black lesions. Those spots, it turns out, were…

I bought my first draft horse in 1986, and I have been working horses, and oxen, in the woods ever since. One of the most common questions I get is, “Can you really make any money…

Since only a very few trees grow absolutely vertically, determining and adjusting for the lean of a tree is an important skill for any sawyer preparing to fell a tree. For the sake of…

In the fullness of summer and in the depths of winter, chokecherry is not particularly noticeable. By early June, it has all but disappeared as part of the anonymous expanse of greenness that…

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…

It’s cheap, it’s plastic, but for half a century, the little 21-drawer storage chest has been serving its purpose. It and everything in it could very well have been tossed long…

Thomas Deininger is an artist, an environmentalist, and an iconoclast. His large assemblages often fracture traditional artistic premises in an overt and seductive manner. By using decidedly…

The prices reported here are those that log buyers—mostly sawmills and wholesalers—are paying for logs. Because these are prices paid for delivered wood, landowners need to adjust…

Trees grow where they can. And they are surpassingly capable, making do in an impressive array of conditions around the globe, including many harsh places. But there are limits to their…

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…

What’s in a name? With Northern Woodlands as the flagship program of an organization officially named the Center for Woodlands Education, there has been some confusion over the different…

Every acre contains the same measure of land regardless of whether it is steep, bowl-shaped, or the Great Plains. This is due to long-standing conventions of land surveying and accepted…

In your travels, you have probably seen the easily recognizable “Tree Farm” sign on white posts along the roadsides of woodlands or on the gable ends of farm buildings or sugarhouses.…

Unlike spring, summer, fall, and winter, mud season has no official start and end dates. Still, it is a predictable part of the logger’s year, signaling the temporary close to a season of…

There’s been a great deal of talk about the economic stimulus package, and specifically about the checks that began arriving in our mailboxes in May. I like to think of Northern Woodlands as…

An important skill for any woodland owner who is preparing to sell some wood is understanding how wood volumes are measured. There are ways to measure live wood “on the stump” that…

The prices reported here are those that log buyers—mostly sawmills and wholesalers—are paying for logs. Because these are prices paid for delivered wood, landowners need to adjust…

If, when quietly wandering around outdoors, you have ever heard and tried to track down a rhythmic, grating sound, thinking you were in search of a small rodent or perhaps a cricket, only to…

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…