While experienced foragers can make gourmet meals out of any number of wild plants – from cattail roots to stinging nettle leaves – most amateurs focus on three plants: morel…

Blake Thomsen, a licensed land surveyor from Chelsea, Vermont, contacted the magazine with a request that we run a small blurb explaining to landowners why they might see a surveyor wandering…

It was Sunday morning, last Sunday morning, and dawn was just breaking in fishing camp. First there were birds singing in complete darkness: prophets? Cheerleaders? Either way the birds seemed…

Maple Sunday—March 29—was the last day of our maple sugaring season. The sap’s still running but the sugar content has dropped to the point where the remaining firewood in the woodshed…

On a recent trip to East Africa I was swept off my feet by the baobob tree, as has happened to many other travelers. How can a long-lived, successful tree be so entirely unlike all the other…

I came across a recent story in The Oregonian (“Fall in wood products market redirects environmentalist strategy,” by Michael Milstein, December 20, 2008) talking about the changing…

The 2009 season began in earnest last Friday. We had a small run in our southern Vermont sugarbush – enough to make the first syrup of the year. The beginning of the year is always the…

As far as I can tell, there is no cell phone reception anywhere in the Town of Corinth. Consequently, in the office and at home, we continue to use a land line for nearly everything. My wife…

In early summer, our main sugarbush is a lush, earthy place. Limestone knolls roll into soggy spring-fed depressions. Two-hundred year old maples loom – their hard, vertical shapes…

I don’t know anyone who knows the names of 18 kinds of snow, which, as legend has it, any Inuit can easily reel off at an early age. But by last April, everyone I know had at least 18 words…