Cold. The low-angled winter sun burning dully through a nickel-colored sky. Cold. The kind that bores into you, a stinging insect as it breaches the skin, then tingly as it fords your blood,…

Coarse woody debris. To most people, two of the three words in that phrase have negative connotations. Debris is the worst offender, suggesting random junk strewn about. When the debris is…

My third-floor office window overlooks a hillside a quarter-mile south that rises steeply into Montpelier’s Hubbard Park. The slope, steep enough to discourage buildings but not trees,…

Let’s say you’re a rational, educated person with an appreciation for nature’s ways. The summer you were 12, you went to Camp Hi-Dee-Ho, where you were introduced to the…

We’ve all seen it. Every winter, a few weeks after the heat comes on, the doors in our houses start to shrink. If you have traditional 4-panel or 6-panel doors, the panels show white…

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…

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…

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…

When I was a boy of about eight, I used to hunt deer out of a little 12x16 camp that sat up in a bowl on the top of Shatterack Mountain in Rupert, Vermont. My father and Junior Harwood had…

As far as trees are concerned, root damage is the root of all evil. Well, most of it, anyway. No matter what symptoms are visible – early fall color (a sign of stress), sudden death of…