Magazine Series

Michael Low knows intimately every footstep of his 67-acre Green Fire Farm. He has worked this land for a dozen years, and his wife and business partner, Hart Brent, has been here a decade…

Somehow trees put up with all manner of injury and assault during their lives. They have to: they are rooted in place and cannot move to avoid injury. Whether it’s ice- or wind-stripped…

On a warm, sunny day last spring, just a few weeks before the end of the school year, professional timber framer Makaio Maher stood in a small clearing in a stand of red pine trees in Newport,…

Even among the quirky cast of characters we know as birds, the crossbill is a bit of a freak. It’s hard to decide which is more bizarre: its bill or its breeding behavior. Front and…

This is a story about Adirondack hermits, but the place and time in which it unfolds are as big a part of the tale as anything else. It was the late 1800s, see, and everything in America was…

We did a Google image search of the phrase “Vermont art,” and our computer monitor filled up with paintings of barns, cows, and church steeples. Most were lovely – clearly…

As you read this, please imagine a drum roll, or better yet, the sound of a ruffed grouse whomping the air with its wings. With this issue, the Center for Northern Woodlands Education is…

Most folks know that stream-flow ponds impounded by dams built of sticks, stones, and mud are created by beavers. Conical or dome-shaped lodges surrounded by water are also recognizable signs…

We cut about 10,000 feet of white pine last winter off a little nob in the south end of the sugarbush. This summer we’ve been turning the logs into lumber for the home we’re…

For portions of two days, I watched a red squirrel clipping and caching cones from the crown of a towering white spruce. It was a bumper crop that season, and thousands of cones hung in…