Articles

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…

Sitting in Paul and Sandal Cate’s living room in East Montpelier, Vermont, you are literally surrounded by Paul’s life-work: a forestry philosophy put into action. The outer walls…

Also called sweet birch, cherry birch, or mahogany birch, this species is perhaps the only tree around that is best recognized by the flavor of its twigs. The inner bark, as any twig-chewing…

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…

“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…

One sunny day last spring, I was prowling around the land in central New York where my ancestors had farmed. A few years earlier, my brother and my uncle had found the barn’s foundation, or…

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…

Rare is the day when all the resources that a tree needs are available in abundance. And for jack pine, a far more frugal and less aggressive species than, say, sugar maple, survival depends…

I was in the passenger seat, being driven up a driveway by a real estate agent in 1995. I looked southward through the open car window toward a wide valley encircled by beautiful mountains and…

Modern chainsaws are the product of 40 years of evolution. Manufacturers’ continued focus on safety and productivity has produced saws that have a number of safety features that might…

Imagine yourself driving into a North Country town one afternoon and finding a business there that employed 92,771 people and turned out $14.4 billion in manufactured products. You’d…

It’s only natural to take a human-centered view of the world. Through this lens, Lyme disease is a ferocious malady that is on the march north. In New Hampshire, researchers recently…

Tom Powers, a retired Air Force tech sergeant and a member of the Peru Town Council, keeps an eye on a wide range of issues that affect this northeastern New York town – zoning problems,…

Also called birch bracket, this distinctive fungus only grows on birches, looks like nothing else that grows on birches, and is very common. Also in its favor from the human perspective is…

Sheldon and Penelope Pennoyer will tell you they moved to their hilltop land in Greenfield, New Hampshire, because they wanted their boys to do farm chores. Back when their first child was…

Knots in trees occur where a branch has been surrounded by continued growth of the bole. When the bole is sawn into lumber, or peeled to make veneer, the branch sections included in the lumber…

As oil prices climb to once unimaginable levels, and we watch electricity prices continue their upward march, entrepreneurs are flocking to biomass energy. Using wood to create energy is…