Helpers are already at work in your garden and woods, though it’s unlikely you’ve noticed them. They are wasps, and they are busy killing insect pests. Most readers will remember their…

A lot of you know Ken Gagnon – he’s a real nice guy. He’s got a family-owned mill in Pittsford, Vermont. When I called him recently about renewing his usual ad in the magazine for…

Ryan Smith, a wildlife technician with the Vermont Fish and Wildlife Department, stood with his back to the mouth of the Mount Aeolus bat cave in Dorset, Vermont, in early April. Behind him, icicles…

In both New Hampshire and Vermont, landowners and state officials are discussing the benefits of removing old dams and restoring rivers to their historical banks. Many of these dams are small, though…

My thoughts turn to gardens, the earthy fragrance of moist woodland – and to slugs tucked under a rock. Few things disturb gardeners so much as slugs and the silvery ribbons of slime they leave…

How much can a bird’s egg tell us about the bird that laid it and how it lives? As it turns out, it can tell us a lot about the generalities, but little about the details. For example, what does…

In years past, I’ve come across nice patches of morels in our woods at the end of May and into June. They seem to respond to a good dose of rain, and a few days after a storm they’ll be…

Old fields pulse with activity. Butterflies flutter, crickets call, meadow voles scurry, and black-and-yellow garden spiders ambush from dew-spangled webs. Early June footsteps release the floral…

“Going, going, gone! Big Papi does it again with a walk-off home run for the Red Sox!” How many times have Sox fans heard this call after that tell-tale crack of bat on ball? Until…

For many of us who have considered, tried, succeeded, or failed in growing ginseng, help is here in W. Scott Persons’s updated Ginseng, Goldenseal and Other Woodland Medicinals. Written with…

Every acre contains the same measure of land regardless of whether it is steep, bowl-shaped, or the Great Plains. This is due to long-standing conventions of land surveying and accepted procedures for…

On August 13, 1913, Joe Knowles, without clothing, shoes, tools, or food, walked into the woods near Eustis, Maine, for a two-month publicity stunt that pitted man against the elements. For the next…

In my neighborhood, there are biennial outbreaks of plant-eating apparitions. Let me explain. “Apparition” in Greek is phasma: we see biannual outbreaks of phasmids, the leaf eating…

On Sunday afternoon, I picked up Castle Freeman’s Go With Me, and started reading it around 4:00. I finished sometime after 9:00, stopping only to throw more wood in the woodstove. I…

Satellite technology and geographic information systems (GIS) now allow us to accurately show how much of a landscape is paved or covered with impervious surfaces. “Paved” is just what it…

Human history is peppered with movements. There were the big ones: abolition, civil rights, suffrage, environmental protection. And then there were the myriad little ones, which together have brought…

“Stop the car and back up!” my wife, Edie, exclaimed. “I think I saw something in the pasture.” The wet pasture, by a sluggish little stream, contained numerous clumps of tall…

In your travels, you have probably seen the easily recognizable “Tree Farm” sign on white posts along the roadsides of woodlands or on the gable ends of farm buildings or sugarhouses.…

Unlike spring, summer, fall, and winter, mud season has no official start and end dates. Still, it is a predictable part of the logger’s year, signaling the temporary close to a season of work…

There’s been a great deal of talk about the economic stimulus package, and specifically about the checks that began arriving in our mailboxes in May. I like to think of Northern Woodlands as an…