Blog and News

I’ve been trying to line things up to build a house for a few years now, and am getting nowhere fast. I’ve made some recent progress milling hardwood, though, that I’ll…

It’s often implied, if it’s not said outright, that nature is a cruel, cold place. We’ve all seen trees wrapped around each other fighting for light; late frosts that leave…

I went to a tick talk last night in southwestern Vermont that was sponsored by Bennington College and the Bennington County Sustainable Forestry Consortium. Kathleen LoGiudice, a researcher…

You do this job long enough and you turn into Andy Rooney, I’ve decided, which is to say that you slowly become some crotchety old guy who gets mad at the news and wants to tell everyone…

We boiled for the last time this season last Saturday – a raw, cold day. It froze hard that night, but Sunday rose up into the 60s. It felt like the end of sugaring season and the first…

There’s still an element of magic in sugaring, still plenty of things we don’t understand. Take how weather relates to a run. The book says you need a freeze-thaw cycle to build…

So we got our first run the end of last week, and made our first syrup on March 14. That was also the day we finally finished tapping, thanks in large part to our friends Ginny and Court who…

We usually start tapping our sugarwoods around February 1. This year it was five below zero that morning, and so there was no rush getting out there. If it’s too cold when you tap, you…

One of the biggest criticisms of the media these days is that it’s objective to a fault. Consider the flack some editors have taken recently for giving equal time to both sides of the…

This winter, a barred owl has been loitering around my house. My husband arbitrarily declared it a male (there’s no easy way to sex an owl) and we dubbed him Squinty McBold.…