Blog and News

A friend shared this great video with me the other day of Neil Young – not the pop star but a town-elder-type from around these parts – recounting a bobbin mill fire he fought in…

This is more of an iPhone camera tale. I do have a game camera – a Moultrie M-550 – and I use it in somewhat clumsy attempts to glean information about which animals move through…

When people – myself included – write about forestry they tend to focus on the treatments or harvests as though they’re the story. It’s where the action is. But, of…

“Where should I look to find chanterelles?” someone asked the other day. And I said look on rich soil and poor soil, wet sites and dry sites, under hardwoods and under conifers. In…

There was an interesting profile, written by Ellen Barry, which ran in the New York Times this past spring about a guy named T. N. Pandit, an anthropologist from India who spent the 1960s and…

We have a patch of about 100 pink moccasin lady’s slippers in our woods, and every year, some of the blossoms get munched. We assumed that deer were the culprits. There’s a deer…

We ended our last game camera entry this way: For our next installment, we’ll set a camera up in some edge habitat on the top of a mountain in a wilderness area. We wonder what the ratio…

“It’s chaos,” I said. Then: “I’ll call you back.” There was poop on the couch and, I’d just noticed, on my pants. I put the phone down and reached for…

Each fall, the Northern Woodlands Conference brings together people with diverse backgrounds for a weekend of boundary-spanning workshops and conversation. While forests provide a setting and…

We’ve been landing a bunch of pine logs within 100 feet or so of Route 7A – a major rural route in Vermont. Our sugarbush and woodlot adjoin from the west; there are houses north…

Gary Lee Miller is a Vermont-based author who will run a workshop at this year’s Northern Woodlands Conference, “Short and Sweet: The Power of the Seven Minute Writing…

Lumber was in the news this week as the Trump administration announced that we’re going to levy a tariff on Canadian softwood. No doubt you heard the news and wondered...well,…

Farmers of all stripes crave consistency, which has been in short supply recently. The sugaring season of 2017 adhered to this rule. Sap ran in January and we could have made syrup then if we…

Editor’s Note: This blog is by our friend Eric Aldrich. You can see more of his images on the Hancock Wildlife Cam on Facebook. For nearly 10 years, I had been camera-trapping…

We had our annual maple open house weekend last weekend, and at one point a group of older women stopped by and visited – told us stories of the sugaring they grew up with. “Lot…

In their early days, game cameras were marketed mostly to hunters looking to get a leg up in understanding the population of specific game species in their favorite (or secret) hunting areas.…

So the crazy weather continues, though of late it’s been too cold instead of too hot. By putting the temperatures from the last two weeks side by side with the temperatures from the…

“We know that getting hit is part of the sport.” -Boxer Frank Buglioni Thirty-two degrees is a magic number in sugaring because without it sap doesn’t flow. A freeze at night…

I just finished a fabulous book by David Brooks called The Road to Character, in which he explores our transition from a culture that valued humility and trusted institutions to an…

An old wagon road begins in our apple orchard, drops down into the woods, and parallels our field. Like many old roads, it’s bordered by stonewalls and old sugar maples, and it’s a…