Now that the weather has improved, I’ve been out on my bike more. A couple years ago I wrote a blog about the wildlife you can see from your bike seat, and how this quiet mode of travel…

I am walking backwards in the woods, wearing a bicycle helmet, and experiencing an intense surge of cowardice. In one of my hands is a stick. On top of that stick, held aloft like a knightly…

It was a gray May day, and at the town forest in Fairlee, Vermont, a patchcut hummed with industrious students and volunteers. At the base of the hill teenagers plucked trees off a…

With respect to Donald Trump (and without making a partisan political statement), I think it’s fair to say that in a lot of ways America is greater than it’s ever been. A perfect…

If you’re new to forest management, it might be tempting to think that forestry is a pretty simple affair. There’s a book out there that tells you what a good stocking level is.…

I recently visited my family’s riverside farm in Virginia, where we’re a few years ahead of the Northeast in terms of eagle and osprey recovery from DDT (the “Silent…

While pulling taps the other day I was marveling at some big trees in our sugarbush – the largest is the 50-incher you see here. To think that it started its life competing with…

Our farm bush shut down in early March, but the Hall bush is higher elevation and north facing and is still producing. We sold the sap we collected last week to a sugarmaker up the road, and…

I boiled for 14 hours the other day, and in between draws and fire-loadings read a column by David Brooks in The New York Times about marriage. He said that people tend to view the institution…

We boiled our first sap of the year on February 21, and once it started, it ran pretty consistently until last Wednesday. By March 1 we’d made half a crop; we’re now at about 60…