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Magazine Series

At Work in the Maine Woods with Logger Tom Cushman

The office of Tom Cushman’s company, Maine Custom Woodlands, LLC, in New Gloucester, Maine, is surrounded on the Pineland Campus by large companies such as Apple Computer and Energy…

Photo Essay: Harvesting in a Time of Plenty

Most of us, whether or not we have farming or even gardening in our blood, think of fall as harvest time. The September full moon is known as the harvest moon, fall celebrations are…

Woodland Invasives: Doing Battle with Non-Native Plants

A huge mound of vines, 8 feet wide by a dozen yards long, lay baking in the August sun. The effort required to cut all those vines by hand, drag them out of the woods, and pile them up to dry…

Apple Scab, Venturia inaequalis

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…

Draft Animals Can Play a Vital Role in Forestry

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…

Determining a Tree’s Lean

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…

Chokecherry, Prunus virginiana

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…

A Damaging Tradition: Diameter-Limit Cutting Diminishes a Woodlot

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…

The Long View

It’s cheap, it’s plastic, but for half a century, the little 21-drawer storage chest has been serving its purpose. It and everything in it could very well have been tossed long…

The Outdoor Palette

Thomas Deininger is an artist, an environmentalist, and an iconoclast. His large assemblages often fracture traditional artistic premises in an overt and seductive manner. By using decidedly…