From hickory nuts and beechnuts to hazelnuts and acorns, nut-bearing trees and shrubs produced a bounty this year.  Local wild nuts are free and healthy to eat.  Plus, they don’t…

It’s a positive spin on the long canoe trip. No signs of the hypothermia that can result from an early spring downpour or dunking. No welts from the blackfly or mosquito attacks of summer. No…

A few weeks back, The New Yorker ran a fascinating story on illegal logging, with a focus on the trade in stolen logs in China and Russia. This clearly is a huge problem rife with underworld…

Although apple scab is everywhere all the time, it is most apparent in the fall, as we try to avoid apples spotted with its telltale, ugly, black lesions. Those spots, it turns out, were predetermined…

They soar and glide with the grace of our most elegant birds. They are content exploring the high seas for fish or picking through dumpsters for fast-food leftovers. They are approachable and…

One Friday afternoon this past July, a micro-burst hailstorm descended on our farm. I noticed right away that most of our vine crops had been decimated. The following morning, I noticed that a…

On many mornings I share my shower with a long-legged friend. In fact my friend has eight very long legs and the same number of eyes.  She usually hangs upside-down in a loose web above the…

On Oct. 28th, our staff, our publication partners, state agency exhibitors, and landowners celebrated our new Vermont version of The Place You Call Home. Folks traveled from all over the state to join…

I bought my first draft horse in 1986, and I have been working horses, and oxen, in the woods ever since. One of the most common questions I get is, “Can you really make any money logging with…

Around this time of year drivers are more apt to notice dead deer along the sides of highways. You may have heard that hunting is the cause – that hunters scare deer from the woods and that the…

This past summer, my husband and I moved to Corinth, VT, from one of those flat cities to the south. I began working as the Administrative Coordinator at Northern Woodlands in September, and have been…

The plight of bees has been a hot news topic over the past few years. Scientists are still exploring a number of theories to explain why pollinator populations are crashing; it could be chemicals,…

Evolution among tree and bug species is something of a cat-and-mouse spy game: One side discovers a strategy that earns it the upper hand, at least temporarily, then the other side counters with…

We’re all familiar with the impossibly loud blasts emitted by tiny spring peepers in March. But have you noticed that peepers peep again in early October, not from ponds, but from the woods? In…

Since only a very few trees grow absolutely vertically, determining and adjusting for the lean of a tree is an important skill for any sawyer preparing to fell a tree. For the sake of discussion,…

In the fullness of summer and in the depths of winter, chokecherry is not particularly noticeable. By early June, it has all but disappeared as part of the anonymous expanse of greenness that edges…

For the past six months they flickered among us—tiny flashes of red, orange, yellow and blue floating above hayfields and dancing in flower gardens: spring azures, great spangled fritillaries,…

Adrenalin is a beautiful thing. At Northern Woodlands, we are quite accustomed to the rhythms of a quarterly cycle. Four publications a year works just fine. Develop the stories, sell the ads, work…

The Timber-Frame Home By Tedd Benson Taunton Press, 1997 Timber framing has become very popular the Northeast in the past 35 years as people have rediscovered the beauty and history of this…

Let me start with a story. Several years ago, a logger showed me the harvesting he was doing on a piece of his family’s property. This was the third time he had harvested this particular piece,…