Vermont Almanac, Volume V

stories from & for the land | volume v

This is an interesting planet.

It deserves all the attention you can give it. m a r i ly n n e ro b i n s o n

www . vermontalmanac . org we are :

Sugarmaker & Editor dave mance iii

Christmas Tree Grower & Editor patrick white

Business Manager amy peberdy

Designer / liquid studio

lisa cadieux

for the land publishing board of directors

Marjorie Ryerson, President Trevor Mance, Vice President Chuck Wooster, Secretary Lora Marchand Jack Thomas Very special thanks to Virginia Barlow and Brett Ann Stanciu – we wouldn’t have been able to make this book without their help. behind the scenes

Marian Cawley, Emily Cohen, Giom, Tamara White Volume V: Copyright 2024 For the Land Publishing, Inc., PO Box 514, Corinth, Vermont 05039.

For purchase inquiries, or to sponsor our work, please contact amy@vermontalmanac.org.

Direct all editorial correspondence to dave@vermontalmanac.org.

For the Land Publishing, Inc., is a 501 (c) (3) public benefit educational organization.

Printed in Milton, Vermont.

cover painting

William Hoyt

What inspires one to become an artist? For me it was a love of detail. Every time I drew something as a kid, I tried to get every detail just right. Later, I had the good fortune to study with Dick Grosvenor. I remember going with him to see a show of Andrew Wyeth’s watercolors and staring at “Winter Corn,” with its dried, bleached leaves. I couldn’t believe the clarity. Looking back, that’s what hooked me. Over time I’ve built up an intimacy with mediums, textures, colors, paint, brushes, and endless subjects. I try to bring that knowledge into every piece, and to use the details to celebrate the ordinary and extraordinary beauty of today – land, people, life. monthly paintings

Hannah Sessions

My art has always come from a place of instinct for me. When I draw or paint it is like a meditation, an opportunity to fully see and appreciate the beauty and wonder around us. As a farmer (Blue Ledge Farm goat dairy, established in 2000) in Addison County, I live surrounded by my muses – be it the landscape, animals, farms, or food. I am fascinated by the lay of the land, by the way that light and human existence can create beautiful patterns, by the bond that we have with our livestock, who are both our friends and our livelihoods.

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c o n t r i b u t o r s

caitlin ackermann was born

tania aebi still lives in Corinth

joyce amsden is a homesteader,

gina auriema is a life-long

virginia barlow has worked

amy bowen is founder of 7th Seed

megan browning is a farmer,

mark bushnell is a long-time

lisa cadieux was born and raised

and raised in Cabot, where she still lives and works full-time on the maple farm. 144

Vermonter who does a lot of different things. Not quite retired yet, she finds time to ride horses, garden, walk with her dog, and play with her granddaughters. 280

communicator, and community organizer focused on the continued viability of small-scale farming and achieving a just and sustainable food system. She works on the Farmer Services team at NOFA-VT. 212 stor ie s f r om & f or t h e l an d

with her bees. Last year’s colony did not make it through the winter, but the new 2024 bees seem industrious and strong, and they’ve generously given her four frames of honey. 49

as a forester, writer, and editor in Corinth. 183

Vermont journalist who switched from editing newspapers to writing about history because he enjoys time travel. His books include It Happened in Vermont and Hidden History of Vermont. 278

therapeutic horticulturist, and UVM Extension Master Gardener. At the Central Vermont subsistence farm where she was raised, she teaches homesteading skills and presents restorative nature-based activities. 186

in Huntington. She enjoys catching native trout in high mountain streams, knitting (especially with yarn made from her Icelandic sheep), and time in the woods with her family. 72

in Swanton and spent her childhood in the woods creating imaginary wildlife habitats. As an adult, her creative work includes book design, interior design, and cooking. 1-288

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c o n t r i b u t o r s

maggie cassidy is the former

judy chaves lives with her

lucy clark is a full-time stay-at-

brendan classon is a PhD-

david deen is a member of Trout

dahlia dill owns and operates

wendell durham lives on his

brad ferland operates Ferland

melanie finn is the author of

editor of the Valley News and managing editor of VTDigger. She lives in White River Junction. 274

trained immunologist. He moved to Vermont in 2021 to enjoy a new life in retirement growing vegetables and grazing sheep on a small in-town property in Norwich. 114

family’s diversified farm in wild West Corinth. He spends his days helping on the farm, wood carving, baking, running, nordic skiing, and tending to his small orchard. 42

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husband in North Ferrisburgh, where she is a founding member of the Village Association. She is the author of Secrets of Mount Philo: A Guide to the History of Vermont’s First State Park. 244

Unlimited and the Vermont Fish and Wildlife Board, and is on the Board of the Connecticut River Conservancy.

Whenever he can, David writes and lectures about and fishes the Connecticut River. 234

Marketing, which provides consulting on business and political challenges in Vermont. He and his daughter own The Blue Moon Farm in St. Albans where they breed and raise Finn Sheep. 220

home-mom and a part-time freelance writer. A former editor at EatingWell, she has a passion for writing about food and farming. 52

Chandler Pond Farm, growing 100 percent grass-fed beef, hay, strawberries, blueberries, flowers, and more in the Northeast Kingdom. 285

four novels. She recently received a prestigious Creator Grant from the Vermont Arts Council. She lives in Kirby with her family and three living horses. 36

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c o n t r i b u t o r s

karin fischer is a long-time

cynthia flores farmed for

castle freeman lives in

jenny goyne is a registered nurse

c . b . hall is a freelance writer who

laura hardie owns a business

naomi heindel is the Executive

mary holland is a naturalist/

phil holland is the author of

poetry student of Verandah Porche, and she studied with John Wood.

She lives with her family in Saxtons River and works at the Putney Public Library. 121

and photographer who grew up in Richford and resides in Underhill.

Depending on the season, you may find her biking, hiking, hunting, skiing, or vegetable gardening in the shadow of Mount Mansfield. 22

Director of North Branch Nature Center in Montpelier. She lives in Worcester with her husband and two young kids. 200

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20 years in western Maine before becoming a strength athlete, certified personal trainer, and licensed massage therapist. Cynthia strives to be a coach, educator, and resource to farmers and farm workers. 20

lives in southern Vermont; he snapped this photo while writing his story about Miller Farm. 116

environmental educator/writer/nature photographer. She spends much of her time looking for interesting finds to photograph and put on her Naturally Curious blog. 18

Newfane. He is the author of five novels, some 50 stories, and over 100 prefaces, essays, and other non-fiction. 134

called The Red Barn Writer.

Specializing in food and agriculture, she provides copywriting and content strategy to her clients and has a lavender farm in Waterbury. 194

bestselling (in Bennington) guides to the Battle of Bennington and Robert Frost’s years in Bennington County.

He’s also written monologues for the dead and is still among the quick in Pownal. 168

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c o n t r i b u t o r s

david holzapfel has been

mark isselhardt leads the UVM

mary elder jacobsen is

liza ketchum lives in Dorset.

kevin kouri is the Director of

mark and lisa kutolowski

mary lake is a shearer, butcher,

becky maden collaborates with

dave mance iii grew up in

a woodworker and teacher since 1973. He’s written and studied poetry since his teenage years. holzapfelwoodworking.com 150

The Last Garden, a memoir, and Begin with a Bee, are her most recent books. She is the author of seventeen books for young readers, and two more books about the natural world will be published in 2025. 158

and shepherd in Tunbridge. She’s deepening and practicing these skills all the time and, more recently, trying to write and teach about them. 174

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Extension Maple Program, based out of the Proctor Maple Research Center. He draws on degrees in forest management, plant biology, and twentysix years of experience in maple to provide research-based education. 140

Nutrition and Sales at Phoenix Feeds and Nutrition. He draws on degrees in animal science and dairy nutrition, as well as decades of dairy nutrition consulting regionally and globally. 120

farmers through her role as a research assistant professor at UVM Extension.

Becky has been growing organic vegetables for over two decades and currently farms with her family in Orwell. 212

the author of Stonechat, her debut collection of poetry. A writer, illustrator, editor, and community volunteer, she lives in North Calais. maryelderjacobsen.com. 231

moved to Strafford in 2017. They grow a garden, chickens, sheep, three kiddos, and Metanoia of Vermont – a ministry of Christian faith, intentional simplicity, hospitality, and care of the land. 76

Shaftsbury in Floyd Holliday’s old house (see page 168). He spent many hours of his youth picking morels that grew under apple trees Robert Frost planted in 1921. 11

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c o n t r i b u t o r s

megan mayhew - bergman is

kerrin mc cadden is the author

A co-founder of the Vermont Center for Ecostudies, kent mc farland is a conservation biologist, photographer, writer, and naturalist. 40

jim ord is a redneck hippie cross,

steven pappas is the executive

verandah porche is a cultural

bill pendergraf t founded

maria buteux reade spent 27

andy robinson is a gardener,

the author of three books of fiction.

She writes regularly for The Guardian, Paris Review, The New Yorker, and The New York Times, and is an associate professor at Middlebury College. 166

trying to live off the land. 21

Environmental Media in 1988 to write and produce environmental education content. His second book of poetry, Love in the Age of Loneliness, is available at www.environmentalmedia. com. 98 stor ie s f r om & f or t h e l an d

of the poetry collection American Wake, a finalist for the New England Book Award. She teaches at The Center for Technology and lives in South Burlington. 14

editor of The Times Argus and Rutland Herald. A native Vermonter, he lives in Plainfield on property that has been in his family for generations. 268

years as a boarding school teacher and then became a writer, farmer, and cook. She’s the managing editor of Edible Vermont magazine and lives along the Battenkill River with her artist husband, Ned. 69

worker: poet, songwriter, mentor, scribe, and selectboard member, based in Guilford. Hear songs and poems on www.patreon.com/pattyandverandah verandahporche.com. A new album is in the works. 109

author, and consultant to nonprofit organizations. He lives in Plainfield with his spouse, Jan Waterman. 90

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c o n t r i b u t o r s

joe ringenberg grew up in

chelsea clarke sawyer

tom slayton was editor in chief

li shen grew up in London. She

spent several decades in medical research before jumping into sculpture, photography, and writing. 208

After more than three decades as parttimers, jon stableford and his wife moved into their South Strafford home in 2010 as permanent residents.

He is a retired teacher. 84

brett ann stanciu is the author

ethan tapper is a forester and

allan thompson is the president

sidne y tilghman is a writer,

the prairie ecology of the suburban Midwest but eventually found his way to the northern hardwood forest. 207

author from Bolton. Learn more about Ethan, his work and his writing at EthanTapper.com, or by following @HowToLoveAForest on Instagram, YouTube, or TikTok. 92

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is an artist and naturalist and the communications coordinator at North Branch Nature Center. She holds an MA from the University of Vermont’s Field Naturalist Program and a BA from Maine College of Art. 226

of Vermont Woodlands Association, a Vermont licensed consulting forester, and certified wildlife biologist. 102

of Vermont Life from 1985 to 2007.

During his tenure, the magazine earned more than 90 awards for graphic and editorial excellence. 252

of Unstitched: My Journey to Understand Opioid Addiction and How People and Communities Can Heal and Hidden View. Her writing has appeared in many publications. She lives in Hardwick. 160

farmer, and art teacher living in Vermont's Upper Valley. She is a graduate of Washington University in St. Louis’ MFA program. 130

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c o n t r i b u t o r s

Born and raised in the Champlain Valley, leath tonino is a freelance writer and author of two essay collections: The Animal One Thousand Miles Long (about Vermont) and The Wild West Will Swallow You (about everywhere else). 180

catherine tudish lives in

joan waltermire was in her first

kit t y werner is a book designer,

brad wheeler lives in Corinth.

suzanne woodard is a nurse,

mike white lives in Bennington

patrick white has spent

rick zamore came to Vermont

publisher, and author of The Savvy Women’s Guide to Owning a Home. She is the curator of lilacs at the UVM Hort Farm and is co-president of the board of the Friends of the Hort Farm. 188

County, is a licensed forester, and helps manage a cross-country ski area. 113

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Corinth. She has published two books of fiction – the story collection Tenney’s Landing and the novel American Cream – and is working on a new book of stories. 28

When he’s not looking at soils around the state, he spends his time in the woods appreciating the vast diversity of the world around him. 228

large portions of the last two years pumping water out of his basement and improving drainage around the farm. 122

of many years as Curator of Exhibits at the Montshire Museum of Science when she wrote her most important poem – about opossum reproduction.

This attracted her long-time mate.

They live in Vershire. 182

herbalist, and farmer who lives on her uncle’s farm in Waterbury Center.

She’s passionate about supporting and developing local regenerative agriculture. 284

in 1971 to pick apples in Putney. He lives in Guilford, where he’s been town meeting moderator for several years. 62

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October 2023 - September 2024 In some traditional cultures, the year begins with the harvest.

Larders are full; things are at their peak in the natural world.

Next comes seven months of decline, and then five months of renewal.

Vermont Almanac marks a year’s time in the same manner.

contributors 3 preamble 11 october 13 november 35 december 61 january 83 february 107 march 129 april 149 may 173 june 199 july 219 august 243 september 267

A content index of the many people, places, and topics covered in Volume I, Volume II, Volume III, and Volume IV is avilable online at vermontalmanac.org.

A similar index for Volume V is in the works.

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p r e a m b l e

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his book will be released in late November 2024, which falls in the aftermath of a contentious presidential election. Political rhetoric, by design, makes complicated issues seem simple. The political process forces people, who by nature are beautifully complex, to be simple – our hopes and ideas for the future reduced to a choice between two candidates most of us have never met. If you’re even remotely plugged into modern life, the hyperbole, rhetoric, and tribalism of the election season will have been inescapable.

So now that it’s over and we’ve done our civic duty and voted, let’s get back to being complex. In nature, complex things are healthy things – think of the vast microbial networks in soil that we replenish with organic matter. Our brains need periodic replenishment, too. We have only one mind – it’s the one we’ll have to live with for the rest of our lives. So we need to make sure it’s a mind that we want to live with.

How do we feed our heads? Through challenge, we’d suggest. Technology promises a frictionless existence – seek out things that are real and hard instead.

Social media works to stylize your life and share it with the world – cultivate an inner life instead. In a world of abundance, choose scarcity. Loosen up on your judgements about the way things ought to work. Nurture a contrarian opinion or two. Have a mind like a fox, as Wendell Berry once wrote, and make more tracks than are necessary, some in the wrong direction.

Gravitate towards things that are beautiful. Lean in to things you cannot understand. Remember what it’s like to read for pleasure and make the time to do it. Turn to page 36 immediately and read Melanie Finn’s essay that opens the month of November. Periodically write your own obituary. Ponder the word ancestor and reflect on the idea that someday you’ll be one.

Take time away from screens; time away from screeds. Seek out physical work that leaves your body tired and sore. Consider the sore muscles your profit. Invest in everything that involves people you love. Internalize seasonal rhythms. Consider food that was grown in or on the earth holy. Plant a food plot for insects. Cultivate quiet.

Tell stories where the trees are protagonists. Look at the lines on your palm and see that, like wood, your skin has grain. Interrogate human failures but believe in human potential. Celebrate your elders. Celebrate young people and new ideas – lift them up where you can.

We hope this book is worthy of your mind.

—The Editors, 10-14-24

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october

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The Woodpile If it were your daughter you handed the logs to, in a line like a conveyor, one thing would stand for another, stacking wood one way to know the past, where one thing becomes another, the shove of the shoulders and the pitch of the hips a thing more like grieving than dancing, of giving something away over and over, landing it with the precision of a triangle into an empty triangle, a curve into a swale, swing after swing, here and here, your palms ending up up, a sign like submission, like okay, like supplication. I am not sure where it ends, this job.

No matter the cold, you are warm and no matter the cold, you hand her each log and she stacks it, you hand her each log and she stacks it, the sound another variable, pitched between bell and knock. She is so sure of where things go, here and everywhere. Somewhere in the day you start testing her, hand her the long table back at the farm, poultry feathers everywhere, the pile of gravel that sat for years, the rusted baler, hayfields gone by, smashed plates, you hiding, you playing this game until memory runs out and all there is is what was.

You see what she does, see: no matter the cold, she is warm.

She moves back and forth, makes nothing of the dying boxelders, their leaves no memorable shape. There is no taking stock.

She works with you like you are working, until you are finished, your backs bent the same.

—Kerrin McCadden This poem first appeared in Tinderbox in August 2016 and it’s in American Wake, as well (Black Sparrow Press, 2021)

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“The Green Woodshed,” a 15 x 22-inch watercolor by artist Kathleen Kolb (kathleenkolb.com).

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w e a t h e r

R

O

Sunny Then Somber

ne of the legendary Vermont weather events that people still talk about is the snowstorm of October 4, 1987, that dumped more than two feet of wet, heavy snow in parts of southern Vermont. There was extensive tree damage, and power was out for days in the Bennington area. Although snowfall totals declined the farther north you went, the six to eight inches recorded in central Vermont was still unusual for peak foliage season.

Fast forward 36 years, and the weather on October 4, 2023, was about as far away from cold and snow as possible. The mercury hit 86 degrees

KINGDOM TRAILS

The sun was fully out on October 2, 2023, and so were riders for the Vermont Youth Cycling race at Kingdom Trails in East Burke.

in Burlington that day, setting a record high for the month. Saint J hit 87 for two days straight.

Woodstock hit 86 for three days in a row. The freak heat moderated somewhat after that, but temperatures remained above normal for the rest of the month. All told, October 2023 was 6.6 degrees above the 20th century mean. In Burlington, only four Octobers in the past 129 years have been hotter.

The western part of the state was also wet – the month ended up being the third wettest in Burlington’s history. Five of the top six wettest Octobers on record have occurred since 2006.

Bennington’s rainfall was almost two inches above normal. In other parts of the state – most notably the Montpelier area, which had been inundated with water all summer – precipitation was, thankfully, more normal.

The weather was not ideal for leaf peeping. The warmth seemed to delay the color change, and then big rainstorms brought the leaves crashing down just as they were getting going. That said, there’s something especially lovely about how the foliage pops on somber days. Back when seasonal calendars were all the rage, they’d always run pictures of the foliage against an azure blue sky, probably to appeal to tourists. But every artist knows that reds and oranges glow best against a slate-gray sky.

There was some flirtation with frost in the cold spots on the night of October 10, but a killing frost didn’t come to much of the state until Halloween night. This is the latest freeze date in Burlington’s history, erasing the previous record that was set the year before.

We looked back at our weather summaries from the past four volumes of the Vermont Almanac and saw that October 2022 was largely lovely and by-the-book; October 2021 ended as the fourth-warmest on record, a title it held until this year. October 2020 was average; and October 2019 was the sixth-wettest October on record.

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STEVE GALLAGHER

After summer-like conditions in early October, much of the rest of the month was somewhat rainy and somber across the state, including on October 19, 2023, at Curtis Pond in Calais. stor ie s f r om & f or t h e l an d

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n a t u r e

n o t e s

e not caterpillars ,

these are the larvae of the scarlet

oak sawfly (Caliroa

quercuscoccineae). They are also not flies, but are in the order Hymenoptera, along with bees, wasps, and ants. These sawflies are found on all kinds of oaks, including red oaks like this one. They eat just the softest parts of each leaf, leaving the fine veins; when they have finished eating, the leaf is so transparent that when you flatten it out on a book you can read the words through the leaf. This species is also called the oak slug sawfly because the larvae are covered with a coat of slime that helps them stick to foliage.

MARY HOLLAND

each au tumn , most of eastern north america ’ s population of snow geese leaves its breeding grounds

along the Greenland coast and other islands ringing Baffin Bay and the flocks head south to winter along the mid-Atlantic coast. Those of us lucky enough to live near their migratory route experience their presence every fall, starting in mid-October and lasting through the third week of November, when flocks settle down to rest, sometimes in concentrations numbering in the thousands. A popular region for seeing snow geese is the Champlain Valley, where the combination of Lake Champlain and farms in the surrounding lowlands provide waste grains and grazing, which draws a majority of the migrants.

Dead Creek WMA and the Mississquoi NWR are two spots to visit for the unforgettable sight and sound of snow geese on the move.

—Mary Holland 19

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Muskrats Hunkering Down

M

uskrats living in streams favor bank dens – chambers that are excavated at water level and angle upwards. Muskrats in marshes, however, will build lodges when material is available. Cattails are a preferred building material, and the plant doubles as a prefered food source.

To learn more about muskrats, you’d do well to search out anything written by the late Paul Errington, a researcher affiliated with Iowa State University. Errington devoted around 32,000 hours to muskrat research from 1934 to 1957, wading and poling through swamps with hundreds of different graduate students. His data on muskrat ecology – sex ratios, litter size, food habits, population flux – are the base upon which modern muskrat research is constructed.

And his quirky observations remain interesting today. For instance, in some marshes he documented extensive food storage, especially in places where duck potato (Sagittaria latifolia) grew. Special pop-up lodges – the equivalent of human barns – were built to accommodate a surplus. Another unusual finding was that in areas with marginal vegetation, muskrats can be omnivorous. In one marsh, 27 out of 66 stomach samples contained bullheads. “This flesh-feeding did not imply any real desperation on the part of the muskrats,” he wrote. “It served merely to supplement an otherwise skimpy diet of first-class plant food.”

trick , for sure .

This photo of a blooming lilac was taken on Halloween.

Spring-blooming plants set their flower buds for the following year shortly after the blossoms fade, and stressful conditions during the summer can put the plant in a dormant state. Maybe the stressor was all the rain in July and August, maybe it was the heat in October, but whatever the case, when the cooler temperatures of fall finally showed up at the very end of the month, some of the flower buds were triggered to bloom. stor ie s f r om & f or t h e l an d

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a t

h o m e

c Farming, and even serious home gardening, is an athletic endeavor that often does not get the credit it deserves. In a single day, the number of bends, squats, hinges, and lifts needed in farming are too many to count, and, besides, there’s work to be done. Labor-Movement is an organization that coaches farmers as Athletes in Overalls™ to build awareness of body mechanics and movement patterns in an effort to prevent injury, increase efficiency, and extend career longevity. Here are some tips and suggested exercises to help you with fall-related chores. See January, April, and July for tips on winter, spring, and summer chores.

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Fall: Harvest Lifting

n fall, the jobs on many farms involve the heavier work of harvesting. Lifting and moving strategies are especially important; as the days grow shorter, we may feel rushed, and our individual capacity and well-being may be flagging.

When lifting, lowering, or moving a heavy load, best practices include maintaining a neutral spine – no bends in the back other than naturally occurring curvature – and core engagement. To practice what a neutral spine feels like, hold a broom handle or field tool against your back and be sure it maintains these three points of contact: back of your head (chin is in a neutral position), in between your shoulder blades, and at the top of your pelvis, aka “plumber’s crack.” Next, practice hinging and squatting while maintaining this alignment, considering that the brain often needs

three-plus exposures to a new task or movement before it begins to build neural pathways (habits).

Another consideration when lifting and moving loads is the load itself. Many farms have standard-sized totes and crates for harvest that are filled to a similar capacity, for example 50 pounds.

What may be different is the bodyweight of the farmer, their individual capacity, and individual preparedness (food, fluid, sleep, and stress exposures). And remember that 50 pounds to a 200-pound person represents 25 percent of their bodyweight; for a 125-pound person, that same weight is 40 percent of their bodyweight. The toll on each individual is unique to that individual; this should be considered, as it can have an impact on the welfare of you and/or your crew members.

—Cynthia Flores

UN–LINCOLN

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Venison Jerky Following our annual May Day gathering, I found a container labeled VENISON JERKY. Looked like dry bacon – a slow, salty-sweet chew. Irresistible. The hunter-maker Jim Ord, an old friend, builder of custom log houses, “travelin around and liven off the land,” sent this prose-poem recipe. – Verandah Porche I am somewhat passionate about venison and its wild healthy protein.

The flavor is so enhanced by proper harvesting and handling – a quick surprise kill, prompt chilling of the carcass, at least two weeks of cold aging, fresh and tender cuts not to be over-cooked.

Tougher things like necks or shanks like it low and slow in a braise or crock pot.

But jerky is candy, best made from the rounds, top or bottom, sliced at about ¼ inch with the grain, marinated overnight in the fridge, then rinsed thoroughly to remove excess salt, put on racks to air dry for an hour or two (a nice pellicle will form).

Then into some form of smoker for a bit of flavor (not really necessary).

The rest is a drying process.

Some smokers are also good at drying, however, it can be done in an oven or even in a hot boiler room as I do – not too much heat (nothing over 160).

Get it almost brittle then store it in a paper bag for a while and it will rehydrate with air humidity to a nice texture.

It is fully cured and dried, and needs no refrigeration for some weeks.

It will last nearly forever in cold storage but never seems to stay around that long.

The brine I like is simple.

I prefer plainer flavor than some – 3-ish pounds of venison, ½ cup kosher salt, ½ cup sugar (I used ½ cup maple syrup) 1 quart water Many folks add spices and other flavors like soy sauce.

—Jim Ord stor ie s f r om & f or t h e l an d

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Connection in the Kingdom

lessons from a vermont moose hunt

july 21 st

On a hot summer day, my partner Karl stood on our stoop grinning after receiving the day’s mail. He held up a manila envelope, presenting it like a trophy. The sender was Vermont’s Fish and Wildlife Department. This in itself did not communicate much to me. But in the upper right-hand corner, stamped in faded blue ink, was a small five letter word: “Moose.” Karl peered over the envelope, barely containing himself. He’d won the lottery…the Vermont moose hunt lottery, that is.

Winning a moose tag in Vermont is looked at as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Of 5,510 applicants in 2023, only 180 permits were issued.

Karl hadn’t expected to win, and it really wasn’t a year in which we had time for such an endeavor.

But what choice do you have when a once-in-alifetime opportunity presents itself ? Just like that, our October plans went on hold, house renovations and rot repairs be damned.

Karl’s permit was for a cow in Wildlife Management Unit E1. Vermont is divided into 17 hunting units, and E1 and E2, located in the farthest reaches of the Northeast Kingdom, are the only two in which moose hunting is allowed.

This region carries about half of the state’s moose population. The parasitic winter tick has crossed a tipping point here, negatively affecting the health of its primary host – the moose. Biologists have found that in areas with lower moose densities the ticks are much less prolific and the moose are healthier, which is why there’s a moose hunt here.

Due to the size of the quarry, a moose tag permits a party of three to work as a unit. They must stick together and only two can be armed.

Karl’s friend Nick would be the “second shooter” to accompany him each day and the third person would rotate. Our buddy Kevin was available on day one, and another friend, Jake, would drive over from Maine for days five and six. But nobody could commit to days two through four. As the

PHOTOS BY JENNY GOYNE

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hunt closed in, Karl finally turned to me, his inexperienced female partner. My response was an eager yes. By default or otherwise, I relished the opportunity to learn from experienced hunters, and also to be invited to moose camp. Hunting camp had always been “for the guys.” october 20 th

After much research, the time finally came. Nick offered up his family’s cabin in West Charleston as base camp, approximately a 45-minute ride stor ie s f r om & f or t h e l an d

Karl with moose heart. from E1. I drove separately to camp, as Karl had gone up ahead for some last-minute scouting.

With only one season of hunting under my belt, I walked into the cabin hesitantly, unsure of my place. Nick’s dad, Paul, joined us at camp for the week and quickly put me at ease.

He explained that his wife grew up listening to family hunting camp stories – always longing to attend, but never invited. So when it came time for

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Marc Farrow and his team prepare for the drag out.

Lori and Paul to have a camp of their own, they amended the rules. Women were included. And although Lori wasn’t present for this hunt, I could feel the warm welcome within the cabin walls.

She and Paul had set the groundwork. Everyone accepted me, the lone girl at moose camp.

Inexperienced as I was, I was a part of the team. october 24 th ,

day 4 of the hunt

I am still, still as can be. We have patiently played the wind right, cresting the hill 40 yards from the clearing, amidst the cover of hardwoods. The evening light is waning and my eyes struggle to see. I try not to blink, eager to see any movement ahead. Nothing. But a large animal must be just out of my sight. There is confirmation in the body language of my companions.

I watch as my partner shifts his six-foot-five frame carefully, trying to find a place to rest his rifle for support. He sets the barrel in the Y of a 25

young tree, but he’s not happy with it. I can tell.

He shifts again, slowly, carefully, his gun now braced alongside a gray birch. Something, anything, to steady him. He’s trembling – I cannot see it but I know this to be true. His hunting partner, Nick, has no trees in his direct vicinity for aid. He finds himself a solid footing and they both assume an athletic stance, one like I have never seen before. I am surprised by how attractive I find this, in a very basic, what must be primal, sort of way. Providers, providing.

After what feels like eons, but I am sure was mere minutes, the shots are made. The woods fall silent. She is down quickly. When we’re sure there is no movement, Nick looks up to the sky, lifting his rifle up to his chest. “And with my grandfather’s gun,” he quietly says. We wait a few minutes, and then the men begin to approach the moose. I lag back. This is their moment.

Death is not new to me. I grew up on a small farm with the circle of life quite visible: sheep and v e r mon t al m anac | vol u m e v

deer were hung from my swing set for butchering.

I now work as a nurse and death does not startle me, does not cause me to flinch or look away.

There is beauty in the humanity that surrounds it.

But here, in this moment, I am unsure how to give my congratulations for a job well done amidst the rawness that is the taking of a life. I don’t know how to respect the animal while also celebrating how soundly these men completed the mission.

I see in them how much they gave for this – the preparation, the long days of bushwhacking in snow, wind, and rain, the tired bodies, the lack of sleep. There was sacrifice, and I want to tell them I see all they went through for this, that I’m so proud of them. But a dead animal lies there, where she stood just minutes before, and I can’t bring myself to rejoice over her warm body.

So I stand silently. Her body is positioned in a way that strikes me as peaceful, her legs tucked beneath her. Almost as if she lay down to rest and it just so happened to be for the very last time.

Perhaps this is my mind’s way of making sense of what I’m seeing, so I can accept, or forgive, the deed I have taken part in. I watch as Nick and Karl approach quietly and ensure she is

Weighing in at the check station (above); a three-day team butchering effort produces 250 pounds of meat (below). stor ie s f r om & f or t h e l an d

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dead. Nick hesitantly touches an open eye with the muzzle of his gun, just as his family taught him during youth deer seasons so many years ago.

There was no blink.

I heard the emotion, the crack in Nick’s voice.

I don’t recall what he said. The words did not matter. His tone contained appreciation, disbelief, excitement, and relief. The guys embraced as they looked down at the moose. I squeaked out a congratulations, some small line about a job well done, something that didn’t feel sufficient.

We stood taking it all in as the last daylight slipped away. And then it was time to work again.

We made three phone calls over a single bar of service. The first to the horse handlers, the second to Nick’s dad, and the third to our friend Jake, en route from Maine. Nick’s dad would dash to multiple stores to find ice, as ice can become limited in town during moose season. Nick would meet him and hike him in through the logging slash. Jake would find us via a crude map we squeaked out over text despite our limited service.

And the horse handlers, well, they could get to us come morning. Marc Farrow, the teamster,

had been busy pulling three other moose that day. He advised us to leave articles of clothing draped over the animal and to urinate around it, as human smells would deter wildlife looking for a meal overnight. We considered quartering the moose and packing out the meat ourselves, but already worn out, with the large task of gutting a 500-pound animal ahead of us, we put our trust in the teamster. Fully entrenched in the task and forgetting about gender norms, I squatted to contribute my scent. After a long evening of dressing the animal, hiking in ice to keep it cool, and hiking back out, it was quarter to midnight before we sat down to leftovers. Contrary to the stories of hunting camp I had come to believe, there was no partying. Instead, we retreated quickly to bed, anxious for morning to come, the moose lying susceptible under the stars. october 25 th

Once again we got a predawn start, this time to meet Bill the workhorse and his teamsters, Marc and Abraham. All three arrived exhibiting composure and proficiency. We hiked to the moose, relieved to find her untouched. Bill, a towering palomino, made her 500 pounds look petite.

When the horse was hooked up to pull, Abraham turned to us, asking “you ready?” We weren’t quite sure what that meant, but next thing we knew Bill was halfway up the first hill, Marc and Abraham running to keep up. Once out of the woods we asked Abraham, also a butcher, “Is processing a moose kind of like a deer, only bigger?” He gave a little smile, quietly amused. “You ever butchered a cow?” he asked. “It’s more like that.” We had not, but the game pole sat waiting for us. the last week of october

It took three days to turn the moose into food.

Two hundred-and-fifty pounds of meat to be enjoyed for months to come, if not years, by many.

When Karl and I returned home we picked away at packaging, grinding, and pickling for the better part of a week until only one cooler remained.

We’d been informed that moose nose is a coveted delicacy, not to be discarded. It sounded strange and unappetizing, to say the least. But I trusted in my childhood friend Jessee Lawyer, a chef with 27

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Moose sausage (left); Jessee Lawyer harvests moose nose, a delicacy, with his children (right).

Abenaki roots, and felt we must honor the moose and the natives of this land by giving it a try.

Jessee arrived with his two boys and his knives.

I had not yet met his boys, ages 9 and 5, and I could not think of a more special occasion for our meeting.We stood in the driveway around a folding table as Jessee went to work. John, Jack, Karl, and I circled around as he methodically extracted the nose, tongue, and cheeks. He shared with us a coveted recipe for these choice bits. Our neighbor loaned us his smoker, and we invited our foodiest friends to take part in the sampling. At a candlelit table, in the middle of a house project that had been put off for the hunt, we delighted in nose and cheek tacos. Jessee had made no overstatements.

The meat crisped and caramelized on the outside, while remaining tender and succulent within.

These often-overlooked bits of meat became some of the finest dishes I’ve ever tasted.

Growing up, I thought of hunting as a solitary endeavor, envisioning a person slowly walking, or sitting, in the woods, with nobody but birds or squirrels for company. However, I found participating in this oldest of human traditions to be anything but lonely. There was an underlying stor ie s f r om & f or t h e l an d

theme that I witnessed over and over throughout this experience. It was there as Jessee shared lesser-known teachings with his children. I sensed it between Karl and Nick as they hunted, and in Marc and Abraham as they handled their horse.

It was noticeable at the check-in station as two kids and their father awaited what the morning might bring. I felt it while chatting with Jake as we rode back to camp. And then saw it between Nick and his father as they sat trimming meat alongside each other, chatting and focusing for hours on end.

That theme I was witnessing, the only word I can come up with to describe it, is connection.

But it goes farther than that. I was witnessing the active form of the word. People were connecting.

All around me were shared experiences that could not be unfelt. Bonds strengthened, fusions formed.

With each package of moose meat I pull from the freezer I feel the enormity of the hunt. As the pan sizzles I reflect on the gift of incredible sustenance this animal gave to us. I recall the long days, the effort involved. And when this moose meat is no longer, I’ll continue to carry its lessons in my bones. —Jennifer Goyne

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Birds of Vermont Museum, The Legacy of Bob Spear

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BIRDS OF VERMONT MUSEUM

magine this: a site not far from Burlington stray parakeet that had flown into the woodshed where you can find every species of bird that – with a pocketknife. That first carving proved to nests in Vermont: songbirds as well as wetland be an inspiration. and shore birds, birds of prey, birds that winter in As he told reporter Susan Green, the expeVermont but nest farther north. You won’t need rience led him to move on from taxidermy and binoculars, a spotting scope, waders, or bug spray, take up a new hobby: “I decided that carving birds but you will want to bring your camera, because would be better than trying to make dead things these birds will hold a pose for you. look alive again.”

Such a place exists – the Birds of Vermont Spear enlisted in the Navy during World War Museum in Huntington, the project of master II and was sent to Chicago, where he worked as a wood carver Bob Spear, who created nearly 500 radar technician. After the war ended, he returned life-sized and biologically accurate birds for the to Vermont and resumed farming with his father museum displays. Tucked into a wooded area along until 1952, when he began a 20-year stint at a dirt road, the museum occupies an outwardly General Electric in Burlington. He got married, unassuming weathered barn. (In fact, it would had a daughter, Kari Jo Spear, and continued to be easy to drive right past if you weren’t looking devote much of his free time to birdwatching and out for it.) Walk through the entrance, though, bird carving. Co-workers remember Bob sitting where you will be greeted by a loon family serenely in his car on his lunch breaks, carving birds, the floating on a patch of painted lake water, and you passenger-side floor filling up with wood shavings. will likely begin to feel a sense of enchantment.

His daughter remembers the fun of playing with Born in Burlington in 1920, Bob Spear moved the curly shavings when they went on car rides. with his family to Wyben, Massachusetts, in By the time he left GE in 1972, Bob was 1924 so that his mother could continue teaching convinced of the urgent need to call attention to school. (In Vermont at that time, married women were not allowed to teach.) In a 2001 interview with Seven Days reporter Susan Green, Spear recalled his mother’s keen interest in nature, as well as her love of drawing and painting – qualities that she passed along to him. He did not mention whether his mother approved of his learning taxidermy at the age of 12.

Following his mother’s death in 1936, the family returned to Vermont, where Bob and his father took up farming in Colchester. As the story goes, it was there that Bob, aged 18, carved his first bird Birds of Vermont Museum in Huntington – a wooden representation of a 29

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Bob Spear stor ie s f r om & f or t h e l an d

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the loss of species and habitat caused by human activity. One of the best ways, he believed, was to make people aware of the beauty and diversity of the natural world; to show what was being lost and threatened. Drawing on his own observations, along with those of others, he had already compiled the Birds of Vermont guide and published the first of three editions in 1969.

In a tribute written the day after Bob’s death in 2014, Vermont bird expert Bryan Pfeiffer called the first edition of Birds of Vermont “at the time, the most comprehensive account of the state’s migrating and nesting bird species ever assembled.”

Bob went on to become one of the founders and the first director of the Green Mountain Audubon Nature Center in Huntington, a position he held until 1978. At that point, he turned his full attention to his great project: carving every bird that nests in or migrates through Vermont.

He had the idea that studying accurate wooden models of birds would be a good way for children and adults to learn about the richness of avian life, as well as a means of inspiring environmental stewardship. At the time, he had not yet thought about starting his own museum.

In 1980, when several of his carvings were on display in a gallery in Montpelier, they attracted hundreds of visitors and earned accolades in the press. As his daughter Kari Jo writes in her memoir The Carver’s Daughter, “After their few weeks of fame and glory, the carvings were returned to my father’s shop in triumph.” The success of the show helped Bob realize two things: not only was his workshop becoming overcrowded, but he needed to find a permanent space where his birds could be on display for the public.

Given the scope of his project – Bob planned to carve many more birds and to feature them in habitat displays – he could not find an existing museum large enough to accommodate this sort of exhibit. Fortunately, a group of friends and supporters joined forces to create the space he needed. Chief among them was Gale Lawrence, the woman who became Bob’s life partner some years after his marriage ended. Like Bob, she described herself as a “self-taught naturalist.” A teacher and writer of books on natural history, Gale was an ardent backer of his project.

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Great horned owl With donations from Gale and other friends, Bob was able to hire a crew in 1981 and begin building a new barn on an existing foundation on Gale’s property. As the building took shape, he spent fewer hours in his carving studio and more pounding nails. Even so, by 1987, the year the Birds of Vermont Museum officially opened, Bob had carved 320 birds. He continued carving and adding to the collection into his 90s, before passing away in 2014. His museum continues to thrive; according to executive director Erin Talmage, it receives 4,000 to 5,000 visitors per year.

After admiring the loon family at the entrance, a visitor will likely proceed to the wetlands hall to discover herons, plovers, sandpipers, gulls, and many species of ducks within two separate dioramas painted by Vermont artist Libby Davidson. The spring diorama features both rare and common species inhabiting a landscape along the Winooski River where it empties into Lake Champlain. The smaller fall diorama shows migratory wetland and shorebird species in their autumn plumage at the Dead Creek Wildlife Management Area and Thompson’s Point in Addison.

At one end of the hall, a tom turkey occupies v e r mon t al m anac | vol u m e v

are shown in pairs, along with their nests and eggs. The pairs – or sometimes two pairs of different species, if they nest close to one another – are displayed in glass cases in a realistic nesting habitat. Where possible, the nests are real, while the eggs are made of painted wood. One of the most recognizable birds in this section is the

CALEB KENNA

his own display case. This is Bob’s largest carving, made up of 46 separate pieces of wood. Talmage notes that Bob spent more than 1,200 hours creating this bird, beginning with carving the basic body shape, then carving separate wing and tail feathers and gluing them in place, and finally painting the finished piece. By contrast, a smaller bird made from a single piece of wood – a blackcapped chickadee, say – might have taken 20 to 30 hours from start to finish.

Most of the birds are made from basswood, Talmage explains. Because of its fine grain and relative softness, basswood is ideal for carving, and it has the added advantage of containing no resin to interfere with the paint colors. Bob achieved the look of realistic feathers through his exacting use of a wood-burning tool to outline each feather, sometimes before and sometimes after painting.

For “fluffier” individual feathers, he used black ash.

Various dramas unfold in the raptor gallery upstairs, such as the broad-winged hawk flying off with a snake in its talons. Here too is a model Bob crafted to depict a scene his father had witnessed and described to him: a gyrfalcon and a goldeneye duck locked together in flight, the duck struggling to free itself from the falcon’s grip.

Much of the second floor is devoted to the nesting gallery, where Vermont’s breeding birds

Winter wren

BIRDS OF VERMONT MUSEUM

Blackburnian warbler stor ie s f r om & f or t h e l an d

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ruby-throated hummingbird, hovering to sip nectar from an apple blossom, its nest and tiny eggs perched on a branch below.

The habitats in the nesting cases are made of different materials. Some are evergreen plants covered with glue, then spray-painted green. Other plants are made of painted aluminum. And many, many leaves were cut from aluminum pie tins. In her memoir, Kari Jo Spear recalls a teenage summer when she was recruited to cut leaves from the bottoms of pie tins, a painstaking process that required not just cutting out the correct shapes but inscribing the network of veins before the leaves were painted. When she mentioned that there were a lot of leaves to cut, her father suggested that she invite some of her friends to help.

Of course, having a steady supply of aluminum pie tins meant that pies had to be eaten first. Kari Jo describes the scene: “The days became a blur of eating pies and making leaves with my friends and eating more pies. Soon pairs of warblers were perched proudly around nests surrounded by lush green habitat, and I had to buy new clothes because none of the old ones fit any longer.”

Besides the galleries of Vermont birds, Bob created a display of tropical, endangered, and extinct birds. In his travels, he had photographed several species of native tropical birds, as well as species of Vermont birds that migrate seasonally to tropical regions. In this gallery, a visitor will find Bob’s most flamboyant use of black ash.

(Picture the tail feathers of tropical birds.) The carvings here are meant to be a reminder of the importance of working to protect habitat in other parts of the world.

Looking out from the museum, a one-way viewing window offers visitors a chance to watch live birds in action at the feeders. A small group of regular volunteers comes in every Tuesday to sit by the window and record their sightings.

Walking the grounds is another good way to 33

The property includes trails and outdoor feeders so visitors can observe birds in the wild. observe birds in the wild. The museum’s webcam also makes viewing from home possible.

Although Bob Spear and Gale Lawrence are no longer there to guide the museum, it remains in good hands. Erin Talmage, who has been the executive director since 2007, discovered the museum by accident when she was a student at UVM. She and a friend noticed the museum’s sign when they were passing by and stopped to check it out. She decided to become a volunteer, and after earning her MS in wildlife biology with a focus on ornithology, she was hired as the museum biologist. Two other part-time staff – Allison Gergely, the museum educator, and Kirsten Talmage, outreach and IT coordinator – help keep the place running. Erin says they also have “a very active” board of 11 members, including Kari Jo Spear, that does everything from chainsawing to leading bird walks.

Now an independent nonprofit organization, the museum is a dynamic educational center that offers programs for K-12 students and older adults. Students from the University of Vermont and St. Michaels’ College participate in programs for college credit.

The museum is open to visitors Wednesday through Sunday, from May 1 to October 31.

It is available for school programs all year by appointment. To learn more, see the website: www.birdsofvermont.org. —Catherine Tudish v e r mon t al m anac | vol u m e v

s p o n s o r

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november

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y friend got his diagnosis in September. “It will be very quick,” he said. He decided it would be November, “because there’s nothing left to do in November.” His last autumn was different from all the others of his life as he did not put up the wood, he did not stack the hay, Jenga-like, to the rafters in the old barn, he did not change the summer tires to winter ones. He did not split the kindling. Instead, he let the apples windfall for the deer and the bear. He did not hunt them, he ate the blueberries instead of freezing them or jamming them, he cleaned out his desk, he made many trips to the dump with decades of flotsam, he gave away his books and his fiddle and his good winter boots. He moved the couch right up to the window overlooking the horse pasture and took to sleeping there. He found someone to take the dog and two of the horses. But the third horse was too old, an ancient gray mare who’d lived nearly her whole life on his land. He’d rescued her from a bad situation when she was a filly. In mid-October, he slipped the halter over her old head, and he led her to the place he’d chosen, and he thanked her and stroked her face and he shot her.

A rainstorm moved in that night. He lay on the couch listening to the rain and the squeaky gutter that he’d never repaired and never would – the squeaky gutter listed in the column of Things Left Undone along with an unmended zipper on his coat and a trip to the Amazon and several apologies he was too late to make anyway. He thought: this is the last time I’ll hear rain; and he was amazed by the swelling of love he felt for rain. The whole idea of rain falling from the sky and filling the cisterns and the rivers was wildly incredulous and beautiful. The way rain moved in suddenly like a child’s tantrum or coyly like an afternoon mistress or with the dissonant enthusiasm of a high school marching band, boom-boom-boom, toot-toot, smash. He said, “It’s true that you notice things when you are dying and you wish you’d paid more attention, all that William Carlos Williams stuff about the red wheelbarrow. It’s odd what I suddenly remember: the pattern of a sweater my mother knitted me, a freckle on my daughter’s back when she was a child.” Apart from that, he refused to regret. “There isn’t the time.”

A warm spell followed the rain, and he noted the arrival of the beetles: gorgeous, gleaming scarabs that ate the mare’s soft tissue. He sat outside to watch them flow over her like a shimmering coat. They sounded: a seething clicking: percussive and insistent. And then the blue bottles swarming in humming veils. He pondered their flashy colors, as if they were proud of themselves, of their importance, like men in hard hats and neon safety vests: “Without us, this planet’d be one helluva mess.” If people had designed them, he thought, we’d have made them gray and ashamed, scuttling in the crepuscular. Then there was a frost and they vanished into the hardening Hadean earth. He felt both mythic and corporeal, transcendent and fleshed, he felt the flesh around his bones, within his skin, padding his organs, he

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RICHARD A. LOCK

felt his liquids, the fibers of his joints, the brain within the skull, the eyes within their gel. His body was November drawing in, like a sash, like the tightening light. He was winnowing and lean and leafless, he was no longer the muscular vanity of summer, he was the truth of himself at last. Essential.

Over the next weeks, the crows and turkey vultures, coyotes, ravens, skunks, weasels, and even three errant beagles (for beagles are often errant) tidied away the mare. They came like invited guests with a sense of propriety and varying manners – he heard brawling at night and the crows and ravens could never agree. The mare’s head was gone and three of her legs but the spine and ribcage remained, adorned with a ragged bunting of dried flesh and hair. He studied the litany of her spine and remembered the strength of her, he’d sat on that spine as she’d taken him up mountains, across rivers and through dappled green droning with deer flies, and when they got home he’d lifted the saddle from her and drawn a wet sponge across her back and under her belly with the intimacy of a lover. Sometimes he had gone out to the barn and put his head against her flank and inhaled the smell of her and that had honestly seen him through the failure of two marriages.

His daughter came to stay. And then snow, two days before Thanksgiving, wrapped the mare so completely in white that he only remembered where she was.

Beneath the snow, her comminution continued as the mice and voles gnawed and nibbled. How plentiful their larder this winter! In the spring, their vast network of tunnels would be exposed by the melting snow to prove there had been life after all, the twisting ways of their traveling, their scurrying and their ceaseless labor, mating, nesting. He knew that some had been taken by the barred owl, and in this way, the mare became the fields where she’d grazed and became the woods where she’d gazed, in evenings, hearing the deer – her wild cousins – deep within the plump arbor and within the bright months before November. —Melanie Finn

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A Normal Month

any of us woke up on November 1 to a light dusting of snow. It felt right, and this feeling, where it concerned the weather, largely held through the month.

Conditions for the November deer hunting rifle season were good. It was dry during the first week, with little or no snow in much of the state, which made it hard to see deer. But it was cool, which spurs them to move. A modest but solidfor-November snowfall came to most of the state on November 21, which led to a white Thanksgiving and a great second week of hunting. All told, the state-wide buck kill during rifle season was up three percent over the five-year average.

We’ve tended to dwell on the losers where it came to the wet weather in 2023, but among the winners were herbivores. Late summer and early fall is often a dry time, but above-normal precipitation levels from June through October meant lush pasture and forest understory for much of the growing season. Deer are not known to be fatty animals – they’re coiled springs of pure muscle – and yet the back fat on some of the does we saw while butchering this year (see photo) was downright porcine. Regardless of the weather conditions, does are generally fattier than bucks on account of lifestyle – bucks run themselves ragged during breeding season – and physiology.

There’s a physiological corollary with humans, as the average adult woman carries about 10 percent more body fat than the average adult male. This unscientific observation about deer was backed up by a sheep farmer in the Connecticut River valley who told us it was a great summer for growing grass at his farm, a fact that translated into greater weight on the hoof and excellent flavor.

In all, November was a rare “normal” month, with temperatures and precipitation mirroring traditional averages. But being 2023, there was an end-of-the-month curveball on the 27th.

Forecasters had been calling for rain in the valleys and light snow at high elevation, and yet close to a foot of wet, heavy snow blanketed much of central and northern Vermont. More than 34,000 people lost power – part of a trend that’s been happening recently where, with warmer temperatures, snowfall events seem to be of the limb-breaking variety rather than fluffy powder.

We looked back at our weather summaries from the past four volumes of Vermont Almanac and saw that November records have been flip-flopping of late. November 2022 was abnormally warm – the first 12 days of the month were above 65 degrees in Brattleboro; November 2021 was cooler than average; November 2020 was significantly warmer than average; and November 2019 was the coldest November on record in much of the state.

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LLOYD DEVEREUX RICHARDS

Snow squall, November 12, 2023, in Morrisville stor ie s f r om & f or t h e l an d

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black - capped

chickadees (Poecile

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n the spring, spotted and Jefferson’s salamanders crawl across the forest floor to vernal pools, where they mate and lay eggs.

But for 90 percent of the year, these salamanders live elsewhere in the forest. Sometimes you can uncover them by flipping over a large stone or rolling a rotting log, but for the most part they’re tough to find.

Technology allowed Vermont Center for Ecostudies biologist Steve Faccio to spy on salamanders using miniature tags that emit a radio signal. With a radio receiver and small antenna, he could then monitor the salamanders’ movements and locations. It turns out they spend most of their time in shrew, mouse, and chipmunk tunnels. In fact, the tunnels are so important to them that Faccio could predict areas in the forest that salamanders would use just by the density of mammal tunnels. Without small mammals present, there were no salamanders to be found, which makes a certain amount of sense, since these salamanders can’t dig.

After tracking them to these surface tunnels all summer long, Faccio found that the salamanders suddenly changed behavior with the chill of fall. They entered more vertical tunnels leading deeper underground. By November, nearly all of them were sheltered deep under the earth. The radio signal was capable of traveling only two or three feet, so eventually, the signals were lost. The salamanders had gone deep enough to escape the ground-penetrating frost and radio spying from above. —Kent McFarland

KENT MCFARLAND

atricapilla) have a brain that’s roughly twice the size of a garden pea, and yet their vocalizations are remarkably complex. Chris Templeton and colleagues at the University of Washington documented the bird’s mobbing calls, and learned that they vary based on the size and threat level of the predator. A high-pitched seet or si-si-si indicates a flying predator; the famous de-des are reserved for stationary predators. The more dees there are, the smaller the predator.

Going Deep

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Spots of Red It’s a visual shock when the bright colors of fall tumble down, leaving a whole palette of browns and grays. Here’s a look at some of the little red berries that remain in winter, catching the eye. preferred over winterberries.

Later in the winter, perhaps because the unpalatable compounds have degraded and/or because other food is harder to find, many birds do eat winterberries.

partridgeberry

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PHILIP BOUCHARD/CC

The trailing stems of partridgeberry develop roots as they progress outwards, forming clones, sometimes large ones.

The flowers occur in pairs and are joined at the base; each berry is the result of the fusion of the ovaries of the two flowers. The two spots on each fruit are the sepals of each of the flowers. Their pollination requirements seem difficult to meet: the twin flowers don’t pollinate each other or others in the home clone. Pollen from another clone is needed, and both of the twins need to be pollinated in order for fruits to form. Fortunately, bumble bees move from one patch to another patch often enough that fruits are not uncommon.

They are said to be eaten by mice and many birds, but it often seems that there are as many fruits in the spring as when they matured in the late summer before.

winterberry holly

Look online and you’ll see the highest praise regarding the benefits to birds of the fruits of winterberry holly. They are said to be irresistible, a feast, a living birdfeeder, loved by 48 (sometimes it’s 49) bird species, and I could go on.

Indeed, it’s a beautiful shrub, but the reason the bright berries shine brightly all winter is that birds don’t really like them. Especially during migration, birds seek out fruits that are nutritious and high in the anthocyanins and polyphenols that protect them from the stress that comes with long-distance flight. In the fall, other fruits, such as those of the viburnums and Virginia creeper, are greatly

wintergreen

The results of a study carried out in Maine suggest that berries of wintergreen (Gaultheria procumbens) are a more important part of the partridge – aka ruffed grouse – diet than are those of partridgeberry.

Both leaves and fruit produce methyl salicylate, which accounts for the familiar wintergreen flavor.

Persisting year round, the berries are eaten by chipmunks, other small mammals, and quite a few birds, except when this low-growing little plant is buried by snow.

—Virginia Barlow

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A

Carving a Wooden Spoon

well-made wooden spoon can be elegant and functional. Believe it or not, anyone with a few tools and a log can (relatively) easily make one.

To make a spoon, you will need a good carving knife, a hatchet, a saw, and either a gouge or a hook knife to hollow out the bowl. Keep in mind that, yes, you can carve a spoon with dull tools, but a sharp knife is quicker and safer because your cuts require less force.

The second consideration is your wood. My personal favorites are cherry, beech, and birch, but almost any hardwood will suffice. I would caution against oak or black walnut as they are wholeheartedly unpleasant to work with.

KIKO DENZER

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I would also suggest that you do not use pine or other softwoods because they are too soft and prone to chipping.

(Unless, that is, you enjoy tiny bits of wood in your food.)

Moist, green wood is easiest to carve because the fibers are pliable. I suggest starting with a green round of firewood, because that’s something many people have on hand, but any smallish-diameter log longer than 12 or so inches that is clear and contains enough material is acceptable.

Once you have procured your tools and your wood, you can start making your spoon.

First, split your round in half, and then quarters. Select the best-looking quarter and plan your spoon. You can make a paper outline, or you can

simply draw it onto the wood.

Keep in mind that spoons are three dimensional; it may be tempting to just focus on the top profile, but the side profile, and how it relates to the grain pattern, is what will make the spoon elegant and functional, and decide its strength.

Once you’ve established your dimensions, hew your quarter-log with the grain (lengthwise) first, flattening the sharp point where the wood was split, then squaring off the rounded bark side, and then hewing in both angled sides of the piece until you have a rectangular billet that is slightly larger than your spoon will be and has a wider face on the long-grained sides (where the bark was) and narrower width on the shorter grain sides.

Now that you have transformed the log into a roughly rectangular shape, you may need to redraw your spoon on the wood. You want to position it so that the crown of the grain is in the same orientation as the bottom of the curved spoon bowl. (Step 1 in progression photo) Now make a cut about one-half to one inch deep at the neck of the spoon (where the bowl of the spoon becomes the handle). Then, using your v e r mon t al m anac | vol u m e v

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FRITZ JUNKER

hatchet at an angle, remove the material from the corners starting at the top of the wood down to the neck cut you just made. This sets the grain of the wood so that it runs with the contours of the bowl and the handle better. This will make your spoon stronger, so if you want a steeper handle angle, make this V sharper. Rough out your spoon’s outline from the top view, then the side profile. (Steps 2 and 3 in photo) Now the finesse work.

Begin to use your carving knife and carefully round over the outside of your spoon bowl and handle until it is satisfactory.

(Steps 4 and 5 in photo). Do this first with the bowl and then the handle so you have extra material on the handle while you work on the bowl.

Next hollow out the bowl.

(Step 6 in photo). If you are using a gouge, leave things a bit bulky so you have the strength to clamp the spoon in a vise. If using a hook knife, you can hold the bowl in your hand and pull the knife towards your thumb to hollow out the bowl.

To finish the spoon, you can sand it smooth – I recommend sanding to 220 grit. Run the spoon under water until you feel it get rough and the grain rises. When you sand this grain smooth again, it will help prevent this from happening in the future when the spoon gets wet. I would recommend burnishing the spoon by rubbing a piece of glass, stone, or metal against the wood. I have done this with a marble,

a rock, and a 10mm socket, so really anything smooth and hard can work. This pushes the fibers of the wood down to make the outside harder and shiny. For a final step, apply a food-safe oil. Mineral oil is

great, but it does not add to the complexion of the wood.

I like to use boiled linseed oil to achieve a darker finish, but you do need to let this cure for at least a week for it to be food safe. —Wendell Durham

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b a c k

Mari Tomasi was born in 1907 to Italian parents in Montpelier. She went to Trinity College in Burlington to study teaching, but soon dropped out to write freelance newspaper articles, eventually working her way up to become city editor of the Montpelier Evening Argus.

During the Great Depression, Tomasi took part in a project called Men Against Granite, which aimed to document the lives of local granite workers in the area. The project was subsidized by The Federal Writers’ Project – a Rooseveltian make-work program for writers that the poet W.H. Auden called “one of the noblest and most absurd undertakings ever attempted.” It’s estimated that around 10,000 writers got work through this program, many of whom were put to work on interview-type projects designed to create a unique self-portrait of America.

In the following story, submitted to the Federal Writers’ Project in 1940, you’ll see Tomasi accomplished this mandate with grace. As for Perez, we were unable to learn any more details about his life. Do any of our readers have any idea what became of him?

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erez said, “Sometimes a friend asks, ‘What’re you doing now, Perez?’ I hear myself say, ‘I’m up on the Hill.

In the Hole.’ And the words surprise me as much as they surprise the friend.”

Perez was a great strapping youth of about 25. He passed his big hand over his hair in a boyish, helpless gesture.“If anyone told me five years ago that I’d be a quarry-man today, I’d have told him he was crazy. It’s the last thing I ever thought of doing.”

“I’ve lived here all my life. My people are dead, all except a younger sister. My mother was Scotch. My father was Spanish, came over here from Spain. From Santander, that’s where most of the Barre Spanish come from. And most of them are granite workers.

But my father wasn’t. He had a small meat shop. Raised his 45

In The Hole own cattle and did his own butchering. That way he made a bigger profit. It was a good business. My sister and I always had the best of everything.

Then, when I was a sophomore in high school, my father died.

He’d gone on a fishing trip with two friends of his. At the pond they separated. Well, when it came time to start for home again, my father was missing. They had to drag the pond with a net before they found his body. It was an awful shock for my mother. She died three months afterwards. My sister was too young to keep house so she went to live with an aunt. I closed up the house and took a room with a family that lived nearby. My sister and I each received an equal share of my father’s money. I had a guardian, but I managed to squander a lot of it in spite of him. I felt pretty big with

all that money in the bank. In the winter I’d take in all the basketball games in Barre, Montpelier, Northfield, and Burlington. I was going to dances then, too, and I couldn’t seem to buy enough suits to satisfy me.

“After graduation I thought of going to college. Of studying law. But the way I’d been going through my money there was just enough left for three years of school. And they’d have to be three careful years, too. I’d been living so well I couldn’t see myself settling down to four or five years of studying and skimping. About this time a men’s clothing store in town went out of business. A friend of mine who claimed he knew the business but had no capital talked me into buying the store and running it with him as partner. My aunt tried to talk me out of it, said I knew v e r mon t al m anac | vol u m e v

nothing of that business, and that my partner and I were too young. But I wouldn’t listen to her. It seemed a good thing to have a store full of new clothes.

Well, I went ahead and bought the place. Invested almost every cent I owned.

“Two weeks went by and I felt confident enough of the business to visit my aunt and brag about all the customers we’d been having. I even laughed at her and kidded her

for worrying so much about my investment.” Perez grinned.

“I’m not joking when I say I was confident of that business.

I thought it was a gold mine. I had a lot of friends. Especially the young crowd. I stocked the store with clothing they’d go for. And they certainly went for it. I guess every young fellow in town blossomed out in a new suit or overcoat. Everything was fine for a month or two, then we had to stock up again.

We sent bills to our customers, most of them had bought things on the cuff. We couldn’t get much out of them. They were all young fellows like ourselves earning just a little, or not having any job at all. I realized then that if I wanted to restock I’d have to use the last of my own money. I didn’t want to admit myself beaten, so I drew the money from the bank and put every cent of it in the new stock.

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The Whitmore and Morse granite quarry in East Barre stor ie s f r om & f or t h e l an d

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“This time I wasn’t eager to see a suit leave the store until it was paid for, or half paid for. I didn’t have to worry much about that. Customers didn’t come. The young fellows who still owed us money were ashamed to trade with us for little things they could pay for – like ties, handkerchiefs, or socks. They’d bring their cash to some other clothing store.”

Perez said, “Well, I had to go out of business within a year.

Lost every cent I had. On top of that I had a wife to support.

During those first few weeks when business looked rosy I decided I was making enough to get married. Our baby was born the week I lost the store.

I didn’t even have enough money to pay the hospital bill.

I felt pretty cheap when my

aunt went ahead and settled the bill. She didn’t pull any of that I-told-you-so stuff. She didn’t have to, she knew I was ashamed.

“We named the baby after my grandfather. I’ve never seen my father’s folks. They’re still alive, in Spain. My sister and I are the only grandchildren they have. They keep writing and begging us to go over and

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Wells-Lemson granite quarry in East Barre 47

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see them. I don’t read Spanish.

I take them to my aunt, she translates them for us. At Christmas I get her to write a letter for me, then I copy it over. This last Christmas I sent them a picture of the boy. He’s almost six now. They wrote back and said they’d made a will leaving half of their belongings to him.

“My aunt has never asked for the money she spent on my wife and boy. But I’ve managed to pay her back a little at a time. Two whole months after the baby was born I couldn’t find any work. I was desperate and willing to take any kind of a job. An old friend of my father had a good job in one of the big quarries. I finally got work through him. I started off working on the grout piles. It was hard work and didn’t pay much, but it meant a living.

It was slow working up to a decent job. I’m a quarryman now. Can’t say I like the work, I’m not satisfied, but at least it’s hard, honest work, and I’ve learned to appreciate money.

I’ve learned to live well on a little. Last week I bought half a pig. Paid only nine cents a pound. So the meat cost us thirteen cents a pound. Not bad, is it?

“In our quarry three-fourths of the workers are French. The rest are Italian, Spanish, Irish, and Scotch. For some reason, the French are favored in our quarry. Maybe it’s because they were strikebreakers in ’21, and breaking the strike meant a lot to the quarry owners.

“Work in the Hole is about stor ie s f r om & f or t h e l an d

the same every day. You have to learn to stand sun, rain, snow or wind. If it’s too bad we don’t work. But there’s no staying abed for us. We have to report at eight, it’s up to the boss to decide if the weather’s too bad for work. I’ve seen it so foggy in that hole that I couldn’t see the bottom. We put in 7 hours a day. If we work overtime, we’re paid time and a half.

“At eight o’clock we climb down the hole. The longest ladders are made of logs, with two-by-fours for rungs. They’re built to hold plenty of weight.

First of all the boss chalks off the block that’s to be quarried.

That's his job, along with seeing that everyone’s supplied with work. No quarryman starts on a block until the boss has marked it off.

“Now the channel bar operators get busy, and drill holes on the chalk lines.

The holes are 2-3/4 inches in diameter, and each one 3/4 of an inch apart. Quarrymen prepare the block for blasting by drilling extra holes with pneumatic jack hammers.

“A powder man does the blasting. If it’s good stone we’re quarrying, black powder is used. This has only a lifting effect. It pushes the stone six or eight inches from the bed.

If we’re blasting grout or waste granite, dynamite is used. This smashes and crumbles the stone. When the stone is ready for blasting a whistle is blown – two long whistles – to warn the workmen to stay clear.

“After a good block is blasted, the stone is cut into

smaller blocks with plug drills.

If the quarry has an order for blocks of a certain size, the boss directs the yard men to cut them to this size. Otherwise they’re cut to the most popular sizes.”

Perez continued. “Maybe you’ve noticed at the quarries that the stone lies in beds and has seams running through it.

If blocks are quarried near these seams, the size of them will depend on the way the seam runs – the seam is useless. The stone must be broken at the seam. If a block measures 5 feet by 2.5 feet thick, it is called a sawblock. Sawblocks are carried up to the yard and piled there, on sale for whoever wants to buy them.

“To get the stone from the hole to the top, the blocks are first roped. Whoever does the roping signals to a man at the top of the quarry. The dead derrickman. He relays the message or signal to the engine room, to the hoist engineer who operates the derrick. A whistle blows. The workmen get out of the way. No stone is carried over the workmens’ heads.

The derrick hoists the stone fast. A good-sized block – say a 30-ton piece – is carried to the top in about four minutes.

There used to be a time when a quarryman’d ride the block, but you don’t see that now. It’s against insurance company rules.

“Well, that’s the usual way to get stone out. But almost every day we get stone that the derrick can’t reach. The derrick reaches out into the hole only the length of the boom, so stone

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in awkward corners has to be handled by blounding; this puts the stone within reach of the derrick.

“Bloundings are steel cables stretched across the hole. Over these is a saddle that rides back and forth within reach of the derrick and any part of the quarry well. Double steel ropes equipped with hooks hang from these saddles. They pick up the blocks and carry them to the derrick; the derrick carries them to the top.

“We don’t do much talking in the hole. You can’t hear with all those pneumatic tools

working away at the same time.

We talk by signals. For instance, if the boss wants me to help a channel bar operator, he points out the man and then taps one hand on the other – like this.”

Perez tapped the fingers of one hand against the outstretched palm of the other.

“If I need a 1.5-inch rope, I pass my hand across my stomach. If I want a 1-1/4-inch rope, I pass my hand across my throat, like this.” Perez made a cutting motion at this throat.

“If it’s a ⅞-inch rope I want, I grab the thumb of one hand and wriggle the other four

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Whitmore and Morse granite quarry 49

fingers. If I need a ½-inch chain, I make a slicing motion of my hands, like this – palms facing each other.

“We try to keep water out of the hole, but we never get the bed really dry. In our quarry an electric pump draws water out night and day. It pumps it up to a pond further up the hill. It’s a good quarry.

We’ve had no fatal accidents for three years. Of course, minor accidents happen. A crushed foot or finger. Injuries to the eyes are fewer than ever.

A law went into effect about a year ago ordering the wearing of thick goggles by workmen striking steel on stone, or stone on steel. It’s hard to collect insurance on an eye injury if you haven’t adhered to this law.

“In case of an accident, the accident rope is pulled.

This rope is always in a handy position in the hole. It blows a whistle. A big metal grout box, used ordinarily to haul away waste granite, is lowered by the derrick. The injured man is put inside and carried to the top. To the office. A doctor is called immediately. While he is on his way, first aid is administered.

“Most accidents happen in the hole. The outside workers such as derrick men, engineers, machine shop employees, and riggers have few accidents.

Riggers are the fellows who keep the hoists and derricks in ship-shape condition. They have to grease them every day.

“Each one of us has a certain type of work to do.

We’re kept busy all the time.” v e r mon t al m anac | vol u m e v

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Brett Kay, director of civil engineering with environmental consulting firm Nobis Group, inspects a seep from the waste piles at Pike Hill Mine in Corinth.

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The Cleanup

he forests of Corinth are full of cellar holes, backyard dumps, stone wells, and lumpy land features not necessarily designed by nature. If you know where to look, you can find the remains of a couple hundred years of human activity during winter and early spring, before the summer jungle buries it all again. In the vicinity of the Pike Hill Mines, grainy black and white photos show a thriving community with a school, hotel, church, saloon, merchants, and manufacturing, all built up around copper mining. For about 50 years, beginning in 1853, the now quiet, forest-draped hills thrummed with activity, populated by folks who had emmigrated from defunct mines in England and Scotland to a booming mining industry in the Corinthian hills.

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and people moved to better mines out west, they left more than ghosts.

Copper mines were either pits dug vertically down into the bowels of the earth, or tunnels blasted horizontally into the hill. Millions of pounds of copper-rich rock were pulled out of the Pike Hill Mines and crushed. To extract the copper, they used magnetic rollers or a pine-oil solution bath. Either way, mountainous tailing piles of leftover dirt and shattered rocks were created. When rain and groundwater hits these piles, a reaction with sulfide in the dirt and rocks forms sulfuric acid that picks up other heavy metals as it flows off. Even today, the stream leaving the Pike Hill Mines area is more acidic than lemon juice, deadly for most animals and aquatic life for more than a mile downstream.

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VT FPR

In 2004, the Pike Hill Mines property (which includes three historic mining areas: Union, Eureka, and Smith) was declared a Superfund site and slated for cleanup; this was shortly before white nose fungus appeared in Vermont and started killing off the bats that had populated these mines.

Before Pseudogymnaoscus destructans, or Pd, as it is commonly called, the abandoned Pike Hill tunnels and shafts had spent a century becoming a bat haven. Thousands of bats over-wintered in the cool darkness. When Pd was introduced between 2008 and 2010, 90 percent of the Pike Hill bat population was lost. A bat might look like a winged Alyssa Bennett, small animal biologist and bat specialist. mouse, but bats are not nearly as prolific as rodents. They reproduce extremely slowly, one offspring a year, so it took decades As she studies how the bats are dealing with a upon decades for this population to build. In just stressful life-or-death situation, she advocates for two years, the bat population living in the mine them. She says the biggest compounding danger was almost wiped out. Overwintering bats all over is people – horsing around, disobeying signage, North America have met the same fate. visiting caves for fun, disturbing and rousing the Like the devastated bats, the white fungal fuzz bats who are already struggling to survive winter. that looks like powder loves cold, dark, and damp The best things we two-legged types can do if we places. The fungus attacks bare skin tissue and want the bats to survive is to leave them alone. This literally digests the bats’ wings while they hang. creates a bit of a predicament on Pike Hill. While Bats go into hibernation with just enough fat the Superfund cleanup project would appear to be stores to get them through the winter. Sleeping a no-brainer from an environmental standpoint, periods are states of reduced energy use called what will all the surrounding disturbance mean torpor, which last for about three weeks at a time, for the fragile bat population? when they’ll wake to go out, get a drink of water, then return to torpor. Pd arouses them more c frequently, using up the winter energy stores too Vermont is home to nine species of bats, and quickly, and emaciated, starved and dehydrated, six of them overwinter in caves. Thirty sites are they die out on the landscape within several miles being monitored around the state; most of them of their hibernation site. are on private land, which makes it critical for bat Alyssa Bennett, a small animal biologist with biologists to have good relations with landowners. the Vermont Department of Natural Resources, is Pike Hill Mines is home to the state’s largest on the front lines of studying Vermont’s ailing bat population of the eastern small-footed bat, populations. She can rattle off bat names and bat which has proven to be somewhat Pd-hardy. facts (her favorite is that, without environmental Among other bat species common in Vermont, threats, a healthy bat can live to be 34 years old). the big brown bat is doing much better than the You can hear her passion for the little creatures. struggling little brown bat, while the northern Alyssa has an MS in neuroendocrinology, and long-eared bat has almost disappeared. studies the interaction between brain and hormonal The EPA is taking the bats’ plight seriously change, which is linked to hibernation behavior.

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and working to create a comprehensive strategy for minimizing bat habitat destruction during the mine cleanup, a project expected to cost about $18 million. In order to get a current Pike Hill Mines bat population count and habitat assessment, scientists who know how to not disturb the sleeping bats visited the shafts and pits during winter to do the tallying, and then studied the surrounding habitat in the other seasons.

They spent weeks combing 15 acres surrounding the tailing piles, analyzing the environment with drones, thermometers, humidistats, and cameras.

They deployed acoustic monitoring and collected over 200,000 bat calls. They banded and tracked individuals to assess Pd-damage and document behaviors. They examined the surrounding mature tree cover for roosting opportunities and assessed nearby water supplies. In the final analysis, they found that just 191 bats of four species currently use the mines for hibernation.

In order to prevent further endangerment of this precarious population, the EPA has developed a plan to provide vegetative buffers around the shafts. They will build artificial roofs and ensure access to clean water while work is ongoing, and will then make sure that forest restoration at the end of the cleanup project is adequate. Phase One, the in situ stabilization of areas in close proximity to the bat habitat, was slated to begin in late summer/early fall of 2024.

It’s reassuring to know that bat biologists have been working with the EPA to figure out how to proceed. However, when the EPA’s work is complete and the tailings have been contained and stabilized, the bats in the mine shafts will be left behind and will continue the struggle to survive and reproduce. To clean up the past, the present has been studied, and we now know more than we’ve ever known about the bats that live here.

Will it make a difference in the end? —Tania Aebi

NOBIS GROUP

Jennifer Lambert, director of environmental services with Nobis Group, collects pH measurements from pooled water at the Eureka Mine lower adit on the Pike Hill site. stor ie s f r om & f or t h e l an d

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GREENSTONE SLATE

Rock Raisers greenstone slate company produces globally renowned building slate

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or someone with a star-studded customer list, Jon Hill is incredibly down-to-earth.

It’s 8 a.m. on a Saturday morning and Hill, the owner of Greenstone Slate Company in Poultney, is loading his two barking dogs into the 53

back of his pickup. He’s invited me to hop into the passenger seat for a tour of his headquarters, starting with a slate quarry: “depending on how dirty you want to get.”

Located in what is known as the Slate Valley v e r mon t al m anac | vol u m e v

of Vermont, Greenstone Slate Company has produced roofing slate since 1955. Hill’s grandfather purchased the company’s first quarry in Poultney after he served in World War II. “He was from West Virginia and they had nothing to eat down there, so he moved and bought this little quarry,” Hill says. “My father at 17 bought what we call ‘the farm,’ which is actually another series of quarries, and essentially we’ve just kind of built up on it.”

Today, Greenstone Slate Company has four facilities; their Poultney location is also home to the company’s processing plant. They employ around 40 men, although Hill says this is down from 70 pre-pandemic. Still, in a shrinking Vermont slate industry, they’ve become the big dogs. “Most guys are like, one guy, one truck, and three people in the mill,” says Hill. Investing in automation has been key to Greenstone’s success.

Despite a drop in employees, their production volume hasn’t changed – and neither has demand.

In fact, demand is growing.

Above: The beauty and durability of Greenstone’s Vermont slate makes it a sought-after natural building material.

Below: Greenstone Slate owner Jon Hill.

superb slate

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LUCY CLARK

After a short ride through the woods, Hill pulls up to one of his quarries. This quarry, he says, supplied all of the Pentagon’s slate when the building’s roof had to be rebuilt after 9/11.

Slate roofs are famously fireproof, waterproof, and highly resistant to extreme weather, making them desirable the world over. In some cases, slate is also being used as a siding product. Indeed, Greenstone’s clientele spans the United States, Europe, and Asia. “The benefits of Vermont slate are that it’s hard and it’s impervious,” says Hill.

“If someone has a high-end roof, they either buy it from Wales or Vermont because our quality is superb and it’s much harder than the other slates in the world. Our slate will last anywhere from 150 to 200 years; slates from China and Brazil may last 40 years.”

Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffet, Troy Aikman, Oprah, and Martha Stewart are just a few names on Greenstone’s celebrity client list. “Some of my clients are not normal,” Hill says with a shrug.

Perhaps the only downside to a Vermont slate roof? The production time. “You really have to plan ahead if you want Vermont slate,” Hill says. “Brazil can make slate [roofing] tomorrow and deliver it on

Thursday next week. With us, we’re six months out, at least.” For many Greenstone clients, particularly those with completely custom, high-end builds, it can take well over a year from the time they first contact the company, through the process of selecting a slate, and finally receive their order.

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a bird ’ s e ye view

To the untrained eye, the quarry Hill has parked beside looks like a ginormous (and very steep) pit. With a pool of aquamarine-colored water at the bottom and rock walls in varying stages of excavation, this quarry, Hill says, provides “purple and green” – just one of Greenstone’s numerous slate color options. From gray to black to sea green to purple, every quarry has a different color, Hill explains, with some quarries providing two or three colors.

Standing alone in the pit are a drill, an excavator, and a haul truck. “Back in 1900, this quarry would have had probably 35 men working here just to extract the stones by hand,” Hill says.

“It was hard work. Now, we have one or two men working here and we extract the stones by drilling. And it’s still hard, but we’re soft now, compared to what those men were.”

To extract the stones, Greenstone puts small charges into the mine to shake the rock. “We don’t want to blow it up, we’re just trying to shake it so it cracks,” Hill says. The challenge is that the workers have no control over what size the stone will be once it cracks. “It may come out as bigger stone or smaller stone,” says Hill. “We have to extract a lot of stone to make an order.”

As Greenstone’s website explains: once the slate is removed from the ground, it gets hauled to the mill, where it is cut with diamond-tipped saws. Next, trained craftsmen hand split the slate, an important step that remains free from automation. Then, the split slate moves on to be trimmed and drilled (or punched) to create roofing slate tiles. These are finally shipped from Poultney to customers around the world. investing in the f u ture

As Greenstone’s fellow Vermont quarry owners dwindle (Hill notes that one just closed their doors the very week of our interview), demand for Vermont slate continues to rise. That’s due to all of its aesthetic and performance attributes, and because it’s a natural product. Regulations restrict efforts at expansion, though.

“Act 250 really hampered us,” Hill says, referring to Vermont’s 1970 land use and developmental control law. “It allowed us to use 55

existing quarries, but it really didn’t let us develop other new quarries.” Because of this, Hill says, his company has had to look elsewhere. “We’re importing a lot of Spanish slate to offset the fact that we can’t produce it in Vermont. It’s not that it’s not here, it’s just that we can’t extract it.”

Partnerships with Spanish slate makers have become an important part of doing business for Greenstone. “The Spaniards are excellent because they want to see the slate industry grow,” Hill says. He travels to Spain yearly and, due to the influence of that country’s slate industry, Hill has moved all of Greenstone’s machinery over to Spanish machines, with great success.

Of course, when something goes wrong with v e r mon t al m anac | vol u m e v

a machine, it can get interesting. “You used to fix things by going to the hardware store.

Not anymore!” Hill laughs. “We have a guy in Spain. It’s been a six-year development of the relationship. And we have wi-fi, we have Zoom.

When we break down, they’re sitting right here on the laptop and you’re holding it up like, ‘Jose, what’s wrong with this?’”

Greenstone is also investing in solar. Hill cites the rising cost of electricity and notes that, since none of the company’s equipment can be run without it, “the worst thing for us is lack of power.” Already, Greenstone has installed solar fields adjacent to all its quarries. The next step,

Hill says, is to put solar panels on the buildings at the Poultney plant.

Hill is optimistic about the future, but focuses on leading Greenstone day by day, order by order.

“I had a stroke 8 years ago and I lost my ability to speak,” Hill says. “That kind of really changed my whole outlook. I never really think about the future, other than: what do I need to do next?”

For the rest of today, what Hill needs to do is fulfill a sample order for a client in Colorado. As he heads to a nearby forklift, a tattoo down his right calf stands out: it’s the shape of Vermont with the words “slate” running down the middle.

—Lucy Clark

Vermont Rocks Vermont has had a very complex geological history: There were the continental collisions that produced the Taconics and Greens, the formation of inland seas that created the Champlain clay belt, and the intrusions of molten rock that led to our worldfamous quarries, to say nothing of the glacial action that scoured our mountains and filled our fields with stone. Needless to say, we’re a state that’s intimately familiar with rocks.

Geologist Ken Carlson has been collecting Vermont rocks for decades, and last winter commissioned a state geological map from artist Susan Judy, herself a geologist. Ken and his daughter, Laura Boudreau, searched high and low for representative rocks from around the state, which they supplied to Judy. Judy turned the polished slabs and raw specimens into functional art.

The piece is currently on display in the Bennington Museum. stor ie s f r om & f or t h e l an d

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ean Menke is the public relations officer for the Burlington Gem and Mineral Club (BGMC), an active group of Vermonters with an interest in minerals, fossils, gems, and lapidary crafts. Menke’s fascination with these topics began only a few years ago, when he was given a copy of Rockhounding New England, a guidebook by Peter Cristofono.

“That really piqued my interest,” he says. “I then joined BGMC to learn more. Now, my son and I go on about a dozen outings a year around the Northeast with the club.”

Menke says that the list of tools needed to get into rockhounding is pretty minimal. He recommends: • a hand rake (the small garden threepronged variety work well) for sifting through dirt/gravel; • a smallish camping shovel, or even a garden trowel; • a mason’s chisel and hammer (avoid carpentry hammers/tools – they’re too brittle and can be a safety hazard if shards of metal are sent flying); • a larger hammer (choices range from 1-pound hammers with 1-foot handles to 10-pound sledges with 3-foot handles); • a brush (an old toothbrush or other soft-bristled brush), so you can see what you’re looking at; • safety goggles and gloves.

It’s important to ask landowner permission before searching for rocks or fossils on private property, Menke emphasizes. “There’s been a trend of private property owners limiting access, so it has become more difficult to find places for collecting.”

This is just one reason that he recommends joining a group like BGMC. “To access many sites, you need to be part of a group,” he explains. “Groups have codes of conduct, and make arrangements with landowners – often paying a fee.” In many cases, the outings may be at private quarries or closed mines, where you can pick through the tailings. “That’s a good way to find ‘gemmy’ stuff – fun crystals that you wouldn’t normally find on your own on a walk in the woods,” says Menke.

Menke offers the following suggestions of promising rockhounding destinations in different parts of the state, condensed from a more detailed resource produced by The Vermont Geological Survey that’s available on the BGMC website (burlingtongemandmineralclub.org). The sites listed here are accessible to the public. v e r mon t al m anac | vol u m e v

towards the Chimney Point Bridge to New York.

Park near the bridge and look at the rocks on the Vermont side along the lake. Fossils are fairly abundant here and elsewhere along the lakeshore.

Note that the construction of the new bridge to New York might have affected the prospects of finding fossils in this area. northern vermont

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A road cut on Route 9, near Woodford and about six miles east of Bennington, features high-quality blue quartz. Other minerals found there are garnet, orthoclase, and hornblende. Another road cut along Route 155, about six to eight miles south of East Wallingford, features minerals such as tourmaline, albite, calcite, and pyrite, to name a few. Many are in large crystals, or large crystal aggregates. central vermont

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BGMC

In Chittenden County, you can find chalcopyrite specimens in the roadcut leading to the bridge across the Lamoille River. As you go north on Route 2 towards the islands, the road cut is on the left. Rose-colored dolomite can also be found there.

The Duxbury serpentine quarry in Washington County is a popular central Vermont rockhounding destination. From Waterbury, go south on Route 100 0.3 miles past Harwood Union High School, cross a small bridge, then turn right onto an uphill dirt road. Continue 0.3 miles, past an auto graveyard on the right to a trailhead on the left, and park.

Walk up the trail past a tailings pile and turn right where the path meets another trail that leads to the quarry. Magnetite octahedra, well-formed dolomite crystals, and calcite that fluoresces pink have been found here.

Fossils can also be found and collected in central Vermont. Take Route 125 west from Bridport

Pink andalusite can be found in a roadcut on Route 102 in Essex County. Just 0.6 miles south of Bloomfield, across the road from a small cemetery, a collector can find this mineral in the phyllite schist. Small garnet crystals are also visible in some specimens.

Fossils of trilobites and brachiopods can be found in Grand Isle County. Heading north on Route 314 (Ferry Road), go past the ferry landing and turn right onto the next dirt road. The black carbon imprints of these chitinous shells are found in rocks exposed on both sides of a roadcut.

Another place for fossils in the north is at the fishing access at South Alburg off Route 2; walk the shore north of the access to look for fossils of trilobites and brachiopods.

Finally, granite pegmatites, “plumose” muscovite, beryl, garnet, and idocrase crystals are found in outcrops in the roadcuts along Route 5A on the east side of Lake Willoughby. Park at the turn-off where a pipe brings spring water down from the side of the cliff to the road; the best outcrops are north of here along 5A. Watch out for fast traffic and falling rocks from the steep roadcut.

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hen Copeland Furniture began in 1975, our goal was to make products from locally-sourced hardwood. Initially we built cider presses, then butcherblock kitchen furniture and Adirondack chairs, items that were functional and affordable for baby-boomers as they furnished their first homes.

What started as a one-man operation in an old garage in East Corinth has grown into a state-of-the-art company on the banks of the Connecticut river in Bradford.

Today, Copeland offers a line of quality hardwood furniture. Using a combination of leading-edge technology and craft technique, we create pieces that feature classic proportion and modern simplicity.

We still make our furniture out of hardwoods from the Northern Forest. And our facility is setting a gold standard for sustainable manufacturing. Making furniture is energy intensive. And with much of the furniture industry having opted to manufacture overseas, ocean transport of both raw materials and finished products exacerbates the already intensive energy consumption.

Our furniture is made in America with American wood. In 2016 and 2021, we built 2 solar arrays that produce electricity equal to almost 100% of what we use.

We’re proud to be building award-winning, heirloom-quality furniture in a virtually energy independent factory. And just as proud that this now 45-year-old Vermont company is embedded in the community and providing fulfilling careers for the men and women who come to work here every day.

Copeland Furniture Factory Outlet 241 Waits River Rd., Bradford, VT 05033

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Doing the Storms for the Last Time

here are a couple hundred feet of stone retaining walls scattered around our sloping two acres, forming terraces for the perennial beds. I used sections of 4-inch PVC pipe to roll the biggest stones across the lawn before jacking them into place using my big pry bar, inclined planes, and muscle. Each wall was a major project and took five times as long as it would have if I’d acquired a small tractor. But I had plenty of time. Now, at age 74, I’m beyond the urge to build any more stone walls and, besides, we have enough of them.

My savvy doesn’t extend to making work easy for myself, and I maintain the house and the landscape in ways that are mostly preindustrial. I like doing the heavy chores, the ones that tire me out in a good way. I depend on them to engage me in outdoor work year-round, and I keep doing them the same way long after most people would’ve purchased machines or hired help. Leaf blowers.

Riding lawn mowers. Snow blowers. Weed whackers. No thanks. I do it all with my wide plastic leaf rake, my old gas-burning push mower, my ergonomic snow shovel, and sometimes my scythe.

Those are my favorite tools, besides the pick ‘n shovel, the wheelbarrow, and my chainsaw. I’m worse than stubborn – obsessive, more like it.

If it takes me 10 or 12 half-days to rake up all the leaves in our clearing in the big woods, I’m there, raking the whole place. Twice. Once for the cascade of maple, black birch, and cherry leaves in October. Then again for the beech and oak leaves that cling to their trees, shivering, until letting go in November and blanketing the hill bisected by the driveway. They all get composted as mulch, fertilizing the soil as they break down. Now it’s mid-December and I’ve just finished the last bit of raking. The grass between the perennial beds among the trees around the house appears swept and well-tended, my favorite look in the yard every year. And I’m enjoying the other satisfactions of sore muscles well used and some of the enduring calmness which Nature provides when you’re out there working with her.

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fortune to live in it for 39 of those years, and to share it with two wives through two marriages. In 1984, Candace and I bought the place and raised Leah here. We had great years and heartbreaking years before getting divorced. Then Mimi and I fell in love and were happy in a way I’d never imagined for 22 years, until she died, here at home, in the beginning of 2021. And now, unbelievably, I’m in love again and sharing all kinds of domestic excitements with Jeannette, who’ll become my third wife when we get around to it.

This house has 53 windows, filling it with sunlight, chilling it in winter. It’s a big house, four floors if you count the basement. Some of the windows are newer replacements, but half of them are original, six-over-one double-hung sash, propped open in the summer because I got rid of the sash weights and pulleys long ago during a manic retrofit to insulate the house.

The original windows have very heavy woodframed storms that do a good job of conserving heat because I faithfully maintain their selfadhesive foam weatherstripping, stifling the drafts. The storms are a substantial combination of wood, glass, and many coats of paint. Attaching them to the house from the extension ladder is difficult and dangerous work, and it’s preceded by the tedium each year of cleaning the windows and both sides of each storm. Storm windows are relics and anachronisms in the twenty-first century, but I love them and don’t mind the wearying chore of putting them up in the fall and taking them down to be put away in the spring. The first-floor storms are five feet tall, and four of them – my favorites, on the east side, which looks out where the trees are densest – are each glazed with 12 small panes of exquisite old glass that have gone wavy, showing the trees and weather through a watery, undulating glass scrim, and casting shimmeringly abstract patterns onto the walls when the sun comes through from a low angle.

The storms allow us the stark differential between the indoor and outdoor temperatures in the winter. They help keep the house warm and cozy, even when the winter temperatures become v e r mon t al m anac | vol u m e v

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judgment and have altered deep-rooted behaviors with her help – one small example: I now load and unload the dishwasher nearly every day after decades of refusing to use it. I may find that tight, low-maintenance windows improve my life, like Viagra has, or like hearing aids will, once I wrestle my vanity into submission.

My reaction to giving up the storms is all about not wanting to feel old as I’m getting old. I want to go on being the tall, strong, competent man balanced high on the ladder, but I know that’s going to change. I’ve been lucky in my odyssey toward whatever model of senescence awaits me – age has slowed gently, so far. That’s the best we can hope for. Now, life and love are giving me a chance to look ahead more clearly, through new glass.

—Rick Zamore

MARK PINK

shocking. I’ve always imagined that they would be on my calendar of chores forever, but this fall I climbed the ladder to put them on the house for the fortieth time. The last time.

Turns out that there are many degrees of warmth and comfort. Back in the early days of my first marriage, Candace and I couldn’t afford some of the home improvements that would have made the place warmer. We burned five cords of dry hardwood plus a couple deliveries of heating oil each winter, but the only cozy places were near the woodstove in the kitchen, and our bed.

Being chilly in the home was not something my second wife Mimi cared to experience and, after selling her glorious apartment in Montréal, she spent freely to expand the house and upgrade its thermal performance. As the house grew in size and stature, I did most of the carpentry for the big projects she financed, and we kept most of the original windows and their storms on account of my attachment to them and because even Mimi couldn’t afford the cost of replacements.

Now Jeannette is sharing the house with me, bringing with her an even higher standard for what constitutes cozy. She loves me, and she loves this aging house, but she thinks it’s silly to have windows that need to be propped open in summer and can’t be opened at all from November to April. She worries about me falling off the ladder – which would never happen, of course, but I appreciate her concern. Long story short, she’s signed a contract with the folks at Anderson to replace the remaining 23 original windows with their state-of-the-art fenestration. Come January, the old sash and the storms will be history.

How do I feel about that? It’s complex. I’d be happy to keep lugging my old friends up the ladder for another ten years, when I’ll be turning 84 and will be irrefutably geriatric, not a bad time to stop. The windows and storms are plenty good enough for the likes of me – they meet my primitive standards for residential warmth.

My wish list of home improvements would not include window replacement.

On the other hand, I’ve come to trust Jeannette’s

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ecember 2023 in Vermont was the second warmest in recorded history. Statewide it was 11 degrees Fahrenheit above the twentieth-century mean, which is an extraordinary divergence. In the five years we’ve been publishing weather recaps, only one other month – January 2023 – was this warm compared to the historical average. Even when compared to the more modern 30-year average, things were around 7 degrees above normal in most parts of the state. In Burlington it never got below freezing on 13 nights. The lowest of the low temperatures was a modest 14 degrees.

In southern parts of the state, it was stick season pretty much all month long. Even the mountains were bare. Prospect Mountain, a nordic ski center in Woodford that sits at 2,250 feet, added some modest snowmaking this year, and you’d drive by and see a little patch of human-made white amidst an ocean of brown. It seemed audacious and hopeful and sad and ominous all at the same time. Northern parts of the state got some snow,

but not much. Saint J ended up with 7.5 inches for the month, which is around a foot below average.

In keeping with the theme of 2023, there was plenty of rain. Heavy mixed-precipitation events in central and north-central Vermont made a series of bad Monday morning commutes a running joke. And saturated ground and mountain snow that packed like concrete set the stage for another flood event, just five months after the catastrophic July flooding.The December 18-19 storm started as heavy snow, leaving about 10,000 people without power. It then turned to rain, and temperatures soared into the 50s and even low 60s. The heaviest rain fell in the south – Guilford recorded almost five inches – but the two- to three-inch rainfall in the northern part of the state, on top of a moderate snowpack, led to a deluge in some areas. The Lamoille River in Jeffersonville and Johnson and the Winooski River in Essex Junction both reached major flood stage. The Winooski River in Waterbury and Montpelier,

daily sea surface temperature , world (60° s – 60° n , 0-360° e ) 21.5˚C

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Prospect Mountain in Woodford brought its new snowmaking system online in December 2023, when natural snow was largely non-existent. the Mad River in Moretown, Otter Creek in Rutland, and the Passumpsic River in Barnet all reached moderate flood stage. Vermont applied for another emergency disaster declaration – our third such application in six months.

It was a fitting way to end 2023, which was Vermont’s second-warmest calendar year on record. Globally, it was the warmest year in modern history by a large margin. One data set, published by Berkeley Earth, suggests that the global average temperature in 2023 exceeded the preindustrial mean by more than 1.5 degrees Celsius, which is the same number

that climate change activists have been using for the past decade as a tipping point. Global ocean temperatures were off-the-charts warm – see the accompanying image. Ocean temps are so warm that it’s not clear to scientists what’s causing it – it seems bigger than climate change and El Nino.

Whatever the cause, we do know that warm oceans create more moisture in the atmosphere, and more moisture means more rain. In Vermont, from June through December 2023, precipitation was a cumulative 11.73 inches above the longterm mean, making that stretch the wettest ever recorded in the state.

We looked back at our weather summaries from the past four volumes of Vermont Almanac and saw that December 2022, December 2021, and December 2020 were all stupidly warm. December 2019 was the last year when we had a December that was traditional in terms of temperature and snowfall. stor ie s f r om & f or t h e l an d

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Doing it the Hard Way

he deciduous shrub witch hazel (Hamamelis virginiana) flowers in the fall as its leaves are dropping, when night temperatures often drop below freezing. This autumnflowering period is strikingly different from that of most other flowering shrubs, which flower from very early spring to early summer. The unusual timing makes fertilization and fruit-setting a challenge.

Pollen transfer (primarily by bees and flies still flying in cool weather) occurs during the flowering period in the autumn, but fertilization does not occur until the following spring, around the time new leaves are produced. The percentage of flowers that actually set fruit is extremely low – less than 1 percent in a study of 40,000 flowers.

Approximately 80 percent of witch hazel flowers fall off the plants by December. Only about eight percent of the initial flowers remain on the shrub by March of the following spring, when fertilization takes place. More are lost throughout the spring and summer, so only a handful of seeds reach maturity in late August.

The seed capsules remain on the plant into the fall, even after the next year’s flowering commences. When they finally dry and split open, the two seeds within are forcibly ejected as far as 30 feet.

— Mary Holland

humans aren ’ t the only species putting

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protein up for the winter.

When you find a mouse hanging (or impaled) on a tree, it was probably put there by a northern shrike (Lanius borealis; Lanius is from the Latin word for butcher.) These predatory songbirds store surplus food this way; hanging the carcass probably also makes it easier to eat, since the birds don’t have talons.

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DAVE MANCE III

eer antlers, which are bone, shrink considerably as they dry, a phenomenon that makes every trophy buck a bit more humble when it comes time to hang the antlers on the wall. (“I swear it was bigger.” “Of course it was, dear.”) The shrinkage happens very slowly, so it’s impossible to see it in real time. But we can see it in proxy. These blade bones came from the same buck. The one on the left was cooked bone-in shortly after the deer was butchered, and the bone dried in that process. The one on the right was deboned and thrown in the compost pile after the meat was removed. Put side by side, you can see that the shrinkage is quite dramatic. Presumably the deer’s antlers will shrink at a similar ratio. we can thank the fruits of burdock for velcro ,

the amazingly useful product for fastening things to each other.

George de Mestral, a Swiss engineer, checked out the burdock burrs on his dog under a microscope after the two of them went for a walk in the Alps. Tiny hooks on each of the many bracts that surround a cask of seeds attach the seed head to passing animals. Velcro was patented in 1958.

We can curse the fruits of burdock, though, for making a horrible mess of dogs’ fur, and for helping the plant take over all manner of habitats, no doubt displacing native plants.

as t h e f o res t co lo r pa le t t e b e co mes

d om i nat ed b y b rown s a n d g ray s , British soldier

lichen provides a welcome burst of color. Its scientific name is Cladonia cristatella. stor ie s f r om & f or t h e l an d

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Winter: Staying Active

arming almost never stops, but Vermont’s winter is a chance for many farmers to slow down or enjoy a change of focus. In these months, along with spending time with friends and family, rest is one of the most important things that farmers can do for themselves. If capacity exists, you could prioritize skill development, specifically by focusing on movement patterns and strength training. Often, physical ability in farming is assumed until there is recurring pain or injury. Viewing farming through an athletic lens may encourage skill development.

Each person is different in how they might want to approach maintaining movement through the winter, or engaging in training specific to their movement needs or concerns. Potential avenues to consider are joining a gym (with or without a trainer), participating in classes, or engaging in

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movement activity at home. If you are looking for a movement specialist, seek out strength and conditioning coaches, athletic trainers, or personal trainers who focus on movement patterns. Other resources include working with a physical therapist, or, in some cases, an occupational therapist.

Typically, those who work with athletes will have better understanding and considerations for the work you are engaged in. Working to strengthen your body and improve your movement patterns now can help reduce the chances for injury once the growing season resumes. This care might even extend your farming career. —Cynthia Flores Focusing on strength training and movement patterns over the winter can reduce the potential for injury when the growing season comes.

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a farmer ’ s winter blessing

’Twas two days before Christmas and all through the house I fretted and grumbled and started to grouse.

Family was coming; they’d need to be fed.

What would I make; did I have enough bread?

With lists in my pocket and visions in mind, I went to the porch to see what I could find.

And there on the table, in bags and in crates

Lay the fixings for meals that would fill all our plates.

Carrots, squash, onions, spinach and beets Golden potatoes, cabbage and leeks

Apples and garlic, thyme and rosemary

Bread from a friend and jams of raspberry.

Down in the freezer, beef, lamb, and pork Pull out the wine, pop open the cork!

Gathered we toast these bountiful yields

Nurtured and harvested with love from our fields.

—Maria Buteux Reade

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Faith on the Vermont Landscape

hurch steeples rise above most every town and village in Vermont, built as one of the first orders of business for settlers as they arrived, and rebuilt by subsequent generations of faithful. And yet our state ranks among the least religious in the US. In 2021, the Public Religion Research Institute found that just 23 percent of Americans report being religiously unaffiliated. In Windham County, Vermont’s least-religious county, that number was almost double, at 45 percent. Bennington County trailed just slightly at 44 percent.

A 2023 survey by the World Population Review found Vermont to be the third-leastreligious state (trailing just behind our neighbors in New Hampshire and Massachusetts), with only 34 percent of the population considering themselves to be regular churchgoers. In Mississippi, the nation’s most religious state, that number was 77 percent.

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“I’m spiritual, but not religious,” is a common rejoinder heard here. For many, that spiritual connection is found in nature. “My church is the woods,” might be their secular refrain. And for finding spirituality in the outdoors, Vermont is perhaps the ideal setting.

But the state is also home to a number of people, albeit increasingly a minority, who consider themselves both spiritual and religious; for whom their church is a church (or a synagogue or a mosque). We wondered what the Vermont landscape offers them: how it shapes and what it contributes to their faith practice, and how the way they live their faith contributes back to the land.

DON LAND – STOWE

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Restorative Work

n the introduction to his collection of essays, The Need to be Whole, Wendell Berry speaks of the “enormously consequential” loss that comes to both the land and its people when they are separated from one another. “The land has lost the work that it needs to have from the people it sustains, and the people have lost the work of the land that would be sustaining to them.” Many have literally been removed from the land, with more and more people living in cities and suburbs. But even in rural areas, the way many of us think about the natural world has shifted. We’ve forgotten, or never known, what a whole relationship with the land looks like. We’ve bought into a system that sees land and people as resources for an economy that demands constant growth.

We consume thoughtlessly: purchasing the latest fashion without thinking about what’s needed for healthy soil and workers to raise the cotton. We expect low prices for our food without thinking about the livable wages for our farmers or the decisions they have to make to care for the soil. We’ve lost our connection to the fields and to the forests that sustain us.

We have a broken relationship with the natural world and our work within it.

As a Christian, repairing and healing broken relationships is an important aspect of my faith. Our selfishness and greed 73

fractures our relationships: with God, with others, and with the natural world. When I look at the Bible as a whole, I find a God acting and moving in love to repair and restore all that’s been broken in this world.

Indeed, this biblical idea of peacemaking, making whole or right broken relationships, was central to the teachings and work of Jesus. Jesus restored people’s sight, taught of a renewed way of living where the last are first; where those who have share with those who have less. Jesus offered a redeemed relationship with His Father for all people.

I believe following Christ involves participating in His restoring work.

Three years ago, our family partnered with local Christian philanthropists to launch a land-based program in Huntington called 7th Seed.

Our mission is to follow Jesus’ example of working for justice and peace, demonstrating love and mercy, and living simply.

We aspire to the biblical idea of peacemaking: working to renew and restore our broken spiritual relationship with God, social relationships with others, and physical relationship with work and the natural world.

On our hillside homestead we have dozens of berry bushes and fruit trees, and we grow a wide variety of vegetables that we donate, along with eggs and meat from the animals we raise, to a chef who cooks

healthy meals for people facing food insecurity in Burlington.

While we strive to be efficient in our growing, production isn’t our only aim. Our main goal is to offer many people, especially young people, the experience of meaningful work – work that nurtures, heals, and makes whole our land and our neighbors by fostering right relationship between them.

A mobile chicken coop we made last spring is just one example of how we facilitate connection. We harvested, milled, and built the coop right here in the forest on an old hay wagon drive shaft. The relational connection between this wood and those who worked with it is vastly different than that which exists when working v e r mon t al m anac | vol u m e v

AMY BOWEN

with wood purchased at a box store. There is a respect and gratitude that looks much more like peace. The chickens who live in the coop scratch and forage, their droppings adding valuable nutrients to our pasture. As we regularly move the coop all over our fields, we not only renew our pasture health but we offer healthier eggs from happier, healthier birds. It might be easier to dump chemical fertilizers and pesticides on the fields, but our Christian faith invites us to grow fruits and vegetables, harvest wood, and raise animals in a way that restores and renews the health of the soil and ecosystems here.

Our movable coop and the happy chickens that nest there stor ie s f r om & f or t h e l an d

each night have connected many people over the past year: from the summer campers who fed the chickens scraps and cuddled the new chicks, to the college-aged summer staff who daily collected and cleaned the fresh eggs, to our farm manager who drove a case of eggs each week to Burlington, to the chef who lovingly cracks the multi-colored shells to create a hot breakfast every Tuesday, to the volunteer who brings the egg-centric breakfast to the city park to offer to anyone needing a meal. We’re not fixing all the brokenness in the world. But propelled by our faith in a loving God, we are cultivating connection between ourselves, our neighbors, and the fields and forests in

Huntington – one washed egg, one precisely cut board, and one warm breakfast burrito at a time. —Amy Bowen

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slam has been the fastestgrowing religion in the world in the twenty-first century, and while the Muslim population in Vermont remains small (under two percent), it is growing in the Green Mountains as well. The state is now home to some 5,000 practicing Muslims, reports Fuad Al-Amoody, vice president of the Islamic Society of Vermont (ISVT), a religious, charitable, and educational organization based in South Burlington.

Al-Amoody says it isn’t necessarily the rural nature of Vermont that is drawing Muslims in. “There are primarily two kinds of Muslims who come to Vermont: people who are placed here as immigrants or refugees – primarily Afghanis, Iraqis, Bosnians – and professionals who usually come because of a job, which was the case

A Peaceful Place for me,” he explains. Largely, the Muslim community is clustered around Burlington in Chittenden County.

While there have been exceptions, notably the senseless shooting of three Palestinian students in Burlington in November 2023, Al-Amoody says Muslims generally find Vermont to be a very welcoming new home. “I lived in Connecticut, Oregon, and New York before coming here, and Vermont is a very peaceful place, a very loving place, very accepting,” he reports. As just one example of that, he says people often reach out to find out what the community needs. For instance, several farms have inquired about how they might provide halal meat.

Halal means “lawful” or “permissible” under Islamic law, and largely has to do with how an animal is slaughtered

(though pork can never be halal). For the meat to be halal, an animal must be slaughtered with a deep cut across the throat using a very sharp knife, with the name of Allah invoked during the process for each individual animal.

Putting this into terms that a non-Muslim Vermonter might readily understand, Al-Amoody says, “So, for example, if I go deer hunting and I shoot an animal and it dies from the gunshot before I slaughter it with a knife, I’m not able to eat that meat – it’s forbidden for me.”

The ISVT has been working to convince grocery store chains to increase the availability of halal meat in stores in Vermont, but AlAmoody says it’s an uphill battle because of the relatively small Muslim population here.

The halal lamb available, for instance, is shipped almost

ISVT

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ISVT

exclusively from Australia, which has farms that specialize in providing lamb for the much larger Muslim populations in the Middle East. So the hope is to work with Vermont farms and create a local supply.

Representatives from the ISVT have been visiting farms and helping educate them on what is necessary for compliance.

Mama’s Farm in Williston, for example, owned by Theogene Mahoro and his wife, Hyacinthe Ayingeneye, have many Muslim customers who search them out for halal goat and chicken meat. Mahoro is a Christian who emigrated from Rwanda, but he works with members of the Muslim community who come to the farm and personally select the specific animals they would like. They then oversee the slaughter process to ensure halal practices are followed.

Al-Amoody hopes that more farms will follow this model, providing a greater supply of halal meat to the growing Muslim population in the area.

There are also Muslims who are starting their own vegetable farms in Vermont.

Al-Amoody points to a number of refugees from Congo who farmed in their native land and are beginning agricultural operations in their new surroundings, often to be able to grow crops that they’re familiar with from their homeland.

And there are other ways that the Muslim population is bringing its traditions to the Green Mountains. For instance, Al-Amoody says the

A member of the Burlington Islamic community helps to prepare halal chicken at a local farm.

ISVT is currently working to purchase land on which to begin a Muslim cemetery. “We prefer a natural way of burying people rather than the way it is usually done here,” he explains, “and we try to bury our loved ones the same day they die, or within two days, so that is important for us.”

Then there are small signs of Muslims taking on some of the customs familiar to other

Vermonters. “The Muslims I’ve spoken to appreciate the greenness of Vermont, the space. Many, like myself, have started growing vegetable gardens,” says Al-Amoody.

“So when we come for Friday prayers, if it’s the season for corn, they will bring corn to share. Or squash or cucumbers.

If it’s the season for apples, they will bring a lot of apples.”

—Patrick White

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Embracing Heaven and Earth

e, like so many Americans, are orphans from the land. Lisa’s parents’ generation were gradually squeezed out of farming by market pressures. She grew up with echoes of agrarian life, next to land once farmed by her family. Mark’s paternal grandparents fled rural Poland for a new life in urban America, and he grew up two generations later as a child of two professionals living in the suburbs with a picket fence. In our singlehood, we each sought out ways to re-root ourselves in things of the earth. On our first date, we shared our dreams of a life and family that embraced both heaven and earth, rooted in faith, fertility, and the rhythms of the land.

We were engaged three months later, and married within a year. We put the word out among friends, and were led to an old hill farm in Strafford. Table Rock Farm had last been farmed about seventy years earlier, and we set to the project of building new gardens, restoring fertility in the moss and fern-laden pasture, and envisioning a new agrarian life for our family and a small Catholic lay community called Metanoia.

In our project, we invoke the guidance of two streams of traditional wisdom: our Vermont neigh-bors and their traditional lifeways, and the Benedictine monastic path.

The Vermont Almanac is filled with the lore of old Vermont, but what of the Benedictines?

Benedictine spirituality includes a deep commitment to place. St. Benedict began his monastic model in Italy in the sixth century shortly after the fall of the Roman Empire, and Benedictine communities became a refuge of stability and sanity in an age of great upheaval. Benedictine monastics commit to living their entire lives in one place. The Benedictines teach, If you can’t find God here, you won’t find God anywhere. This is not about any one place being the best place to find God, but rather an observation that the fastest way to find God is to stop looking for God somewhere else.

Our family life (there are five of us now) is an ongoing experiment in how the Benedictine way can help us grow deeper in love and relationship 77

with God, with the land, and with other people.

The Benedictine vows of stability, obedience, and conversion of life, as well as the Benedictine commitment to hospitality, have been our faithful guides in this project. stabilit y

Homesteading literally means “‘staying home,” and both homesteading and Benedictine spirituality teach the profound value of finding our life and meaning in one place. Like a marriage, commitment to this land provides a tremendous focus in our life’s work. We say yes to being here, loving this place, and these people, and also yes to the bounds of this place – to being bit by these mosquitos and scratched by these blackberry brambles. In fleeing the desire to escape to somewhere else, we find the fullness of life right here. obedience

We follow the principle of obedience through deep listening. We seek to obey what our farm animals, our pasture and gardens, and the wild ecosystems around us ask of us as stewards. We obey one another and our children in their concrete needs.

We obey every time we feel the urge to distract ourselves via the internet or fantasize about a faraway vacation, and instead choose to remain present to the life that is right in front of us on this hillside. We obey when we show up for prayer when it’s easy, and when it’s hard. conversion of life

Stability risks leading to stagnation when it’s not counterbalanced by the vow of conversion of life. While we commit to staying in one place physically, we equally commit to continuous growth spiritually. We don’t want to simply settle for the good life on our beautiful farm, but rather to v e r mon t al m anac | vol u m e v

The authors and their children join other members of the Metanoia community in wearing flower crowns for the Feast of St. Hildegard, a Benedictine nun and patron saint of herbalism. cultivate a life of goodness where we are stretched and give ourselves in service to others – both other people and the rest of the community of life. hospitalit y

The Rule of Benedict states that guests are to be welcomed as Christ in our midst. For us, this means that our way of life is shared freely with anyone who wishes to join us. These include day visitors who come for a meal, short-term guests who work and pray with us for a few days or a week, or residents who stay for a few months to a year. If we’re going to commit to staying in one place, hospitality ensures that we’re also stor ie s f r om & f or t h e l an d

not becoming a world unto ourselves. Most of the time, guests learn about us through mutual friends and our network of relationships, but occasionally someone finds us through a web search (metanoiavt.com).

We don’t know when we might be buried on this land, but we know that, God willing, the remainder of our lives will be spent on this hillside. Some of the maples we tapped this year may be watching over our graves as our children lay us to rest. We pray that when that day comes, we, our children, our community, and the guests that have walked with us will have each come to know we belong. To the God of love. To one another. To the land. To this land. After all, it is holy ground. —Mark and Lisa Kutolowski

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Gathering in the woods at Living Tree Alliance’s March 2024 “Sugar and Schmooze,” celebrating the transition to spring and honoring the Jewish festival of Purim.

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Revitalizing Community, Regenerating Land

he farm field at Living Tree Alliance in Moretown is abnormally flat – it seems almost out of place in the otherwise sloping terrain well above the Mad River. Most things about Living Tree Alliance are somewhat unexpected, in the sense that you don’t expect to find a Jewish-based,agriculture-oriented,ecologyminded cohousing community and non-profit on a back road in Vermont.

Living Tree Alliance was first envisioned by Sephirah Stacey Oshkello and her now husband Craig Oshkello on their second date. They sought an intentional, rural community connected to the Jewish calendar and spirituality, where the residents were connected to each other and skiing was available nearby. It took 15-plus years to come together, but they eventually found the people to join them, and then the land – 91 acres of woods 79

and field that was once the upper portion of a dairy farm.

Building started in 2016 and Living Tree Alliance now has three components: a cohousing community (there are currently six residences, with room for one more); a non-profit that hosts seasonal Jewish events as well as secular school field trips and regenerative agricultural programs; and then the onsite farm, which grows food for the cohousing community, community programs, and a local food shelf.

We talked with Sephirah Oshkello, director of the non-profit, as well as Arielle Sabot, a scholar of Jewish gender and ecofeminism who has lived at Living Tree Alliance for the past year as a farm apprentice, about the connections that the community, the organization, and the Jewish faith have to the land. v e r mon t al m anac | vol u m e v

how does the

jewish calendar

guide life here ?

Sephirah: Judaism, at its core, is an agricultural religion – connected to the land. The Jewish holidays are created around this. It’s said that we used to be a people of the land, and then we became a people of the Book, as we got expelled from different places. So I feel a strong desire to link the customs and rituals back to the land. As just one example, Tu BiShvat is a celebration of, or birthday for, the trees. So we bring people together here at that time to connect with the trees.

Arielle: I think it’s interesting that the Jewish calendar was developed based on the harvest. Holidays have always had their agricultural meaning, and as we became a people that was not connected to land, we adopted other meanings. For example, the big fall harvest festival is Sukkot, or what’s called the Festival of Booths. The original idea was that you would be spending so much time out harvesting that you couldn’t go home, so you would need to build a temporary shelter out in the field.

Arielle Sabot (left) and Sephirah Oshkello check the sap buckets above the community’s sugarhouse, which is leased and operated by local sugarmaker Tim Crowley. stor ie s f r om & f or t h e l an d

the cohousing

component here is described as “ the

kibbutz reimagined .” can you talk about

the kibbutz concept historically , and how you ’ re

reinterpreting it ?

Arielle: From a historical perspective, the kibbutz model was created out of a desire to counter the stereotype of the Jew during the creation of the modern-day state of Israel: a people of the Book, and maybe weak and not able to protect themselves. The kibbutz was a counter-cultural move to basically say “we can make the land fertile by working it with our physical bodies and prove to people our ability to create a civilization.”

Sephirah: The kibbutz movement has been evolving in Israel over time. The original kibbutz movement was socialist, like a commune, where they had an enterprise and everyone had different jobs and would draw an equal salary. And now there’s what’s called a Moshav, which is a community with individual homes that share some resources, like the land and a tractor. What’s important to us here is that we really know the other residents – run into them and have conversations with them regularly, share resources … and ideally we work together regularly to steward the land, host community events, and manage shared resources.

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is everyone at living

tell us about living tree

Sephirah: The residents are predominantly Jewish, though not everyone is Jewish nor do we all observe in the same way.

One thing Judaism does well is to take a pause each week with Shabbat, and everyone agrees to abide by that; so on that day of rest here, there is no work on the farm, no use of power tools or machinery. We often have dinner all together on Friday nights to bring in the Sabbath together. Though we live by the rhythms of Jewish Life, our proverbial “tent” is open to people of all faiths, and we strive to make our spiritual gatherings accessible to all. The field trips and summer programs are secular and open to all.

We serve as a regenerative agricultural education center that is available for everyone.

In 2024, there were three different youth summer camps here, with activities ranging from farming to building monarch boxes to creating scarecrows to river swims. In addition, we hosted a treeplanting workshop, yoga classes, cohousing tours, and a river walk with Friends of the Mad River.

agricultural component

tree alliance jewish ?

alliance’s regenerative

– the farm .

Sephirah: Living Tree’s mission is to bring wisdom, joy, and connection through regenerative agriculture and community programs.

We are committed to redesigning and revitalizing community, and regenerating land. As a regenerative agriculture education center we are building soil, adding biodiversity, and using mulch to maintain perennials. We’re rotating the sheep [coincidentally but appropriately a flock of Jacob’s sheep, so-named for a biblical story of spotted sheep] so they can add their fertility to the earth while providing food for the community. We have chickens that rotate around the field as well. We grow a robust garden with many types of vegetables that are rotated among five different growing areas. We have a high tunnel to extend the growing season. The meat and most of the produce grown is for consumption in the community, but some is sold locally and provided for the food shelf. The goal is to have a regenerative

organic farm for residents and community members, camps, and field trips for students to enjoy and learn from. We invite entrepreneurial farming enterprises on the land that are organic and regenerative. where do you feel

most connected to the land here ?

Sephirah: For me, it’s in the woods, on the walking trails that are connected to Harwood Union Middle and High School’s trail system. It’s wonderful for my own selfcare, and also a great way for the students from Harwood to come over for field trips.

Arielle: I came here because I wanted to have an intimate relationship with the local ecology: to learn more about farming, to get to know the chickens and the sheep and the river. I love the river.

Sephirah: And the community is part of the ecology here, too.

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s p o n s o r

We design and build custom timber frames in our small shop in Lincoln, Vermont.

We are passionate about crafting beautiful, durable structures from local materials, and we are proud to be part of the local forest economy.

RYAN BENT PHOTOGRAPHY | @RYANBENTPHOTO

(802) 318-8664 / @goosewing_timberworks / goosewingtimberworks.com

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Light

hen six weeks of holidays come to an end, when family and friends retreat to their less festive lives, January suddenly looms as the dark heart of winter. Looking forward, we see three months of snow followed by weeks of mud before a reliable spring finally arrives. By two o’clock on a January afternoon, the sunlight is already thinning and the temperature beginning its downward arc. On clear days, stars can appear before the last of the sunlight winks out, and inside we roam our houses turning on lamps.

A Vermont January is technically in third place when it comes to darkness, trailing December and November by some distance. Perhaps the lights we string after Thanksgiving and the candles we light in December make the end of the old year feel brighter than the beginning of the new.

In truth, by the end of January, our hemisphere has begun its vernal tilt toward the sun, and our days have gained nearly an hour of light. Bitter weather will persist thanks to thermal inertia, but if you are one to thrive on hope, look rather to the quality of January’s light, to those extraordinary moments of stunning beauty.

Let’s begin with a clear winter sunrise after an inch or two of fresh snow. Look east through a window, and the ground will dazzle with tiny, granular prisms. If the night has been still, the snow on the branches of your apple trees will sparkle with what look like white lights. These are illusions, tricks possible only with the sun’s low slant, and they last just a few minutes. But take heart: beauty like this imbeds in the subconscious and will stay with you throughout the day.

The loss of winter light is most acute in the afternoons, just as children are released from school. Undaunted, the young need very little light for play, little in the way of clothing for that matter. Look to their faces when you call them indoors. If that doesn’t cheer you, linger in the doorway and check out the flare of golden light on a distant hill after the rest of the land has gone dark.

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of fireworks, but there is value too in January’s quieter light, particularly at night when you stoke the woodstove, put on a warm jacket, and venture out with your dog for a walk. If the sky is clear and the snow deep, turn off your headlamp, and the stars alone will be enough to light your way. The decision may require a little faith, but your eyes will soon adjust. On a night with a waxing moon, no faith is required; the light will be so strong trees will cast blue shadows that dance across your path with just a stirring of wind. If the air temperature is below zero, your breath will rise in clouds, and the effect will be transcendental. When your dog shivers and you decide to turn back, the moon v e r mon t al m anac | vol u m e v

JOHN LAZENBY—EAST MONTPELIER

will welcome you home by spotlighting the white smoke rising from your chimney.

Winter is long and hard, and January is just the nose of the camel. We mitigate the effect by digging pathways, by expanding our range on skis and snowshoes. The air we breathe is crisp and free of allergens, and we rediscover how good it can feel to sweat. Still, there is that pervasive sense that we are waiting for something to happen. In literature, winter is the time for death and for the despair that trails close behind. Even if we understand that in our everyday lives winter is just a stage in a cycle at work in both biology and metaphysics, there are moments when we grow stor ie s f r om & f or t h e l an d

weary under its weight. Just then, these glimpses of beauty, of unexpected light, give us hope.

They are like seeds, maybe just the dream of seeds, like the quickening you experience when you open a seed catalog that has arrived in the mail. Or like that moment in a hardware store when you pause by the rack of seed packets and know that the next season in the cycle, with its warmth and fertility and abundance, is a sure thing. January, the month named for a Roman god with two faces and who stands in doorways looking both in and out, is where everything begins: the year, the long winter, and all the good yet to come. —Jonathan Stableford

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Raw and Cloudy

n Volume II of Vermont Almanac we worked with meteorologist Chris Kurdack, who introduced us to the phrase “high lows” – that is, unusually high temperatures at night.

Nighttime lows get all the press, because they’re simple to grasp, easy to compare, and that’s where you get extremes – we love extremes. But as the climate changes, the high-lows are probably the bigger story. They’re the indication of the heat and moisture that’s slowly building in the biosphere, raising the temperature of the pot of water in a way that us frogs don’t necessarily notice.

Consider January. The average high temperature in Burlington for the month was 3.4 degrees above the mean of the last 30 years, while the average low temp was 8.7 degrees above that average. In Montpelier, daytime lows were 3.1 degrees warmer than normal, but nighttime lows were 10 degrees above average.

The main reason for this was the almost continuous cloud cover that blanketed the state.

The National Weather Service in Burlington reported that 88 percent of the month was cloudy. There were only two days when sunshine

NBC5 NEWS

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exceeded the amount of cloud cover, and even then just barely.

All the cloud cover at night, of course, limited radiational cooling by trapping daytime heat.

And so even though daytime highs felt raw and vaguely winterish throughout most of the month, the nighttime highs never really let winter take hold. It never hit zero in Burlington – according to Matt Sutkoski, whose excellent blog (matttsweatherrapport.blogspot.com) is a wonderful resource for weather geeks. He reports that “The only Januaries that stayed above zero in Burlington were in 1906, 1990, 2002, 2016, 2017, 2023 and 2024.”

The overnight warmth also kept the snowpack low. Southern Vermont seemed to miss a lot of the snow, while central and northern Vermont had at least reasonable totals when compared to the average. We remember in particular a storm that dumped 14.75 inches of beautiful, light snow in Corinth on January 7. The snow just didn’t tend to stick around. Nearly 24 inches fell in St. Johnsbury in January, and yet the snow cover never amounted to more than nine inches. According to the National Weather Service, 27 out of 31 days at the Burlington Airport featured precipitation, but snow depths were only at or above five inches on five days.

The high-lows also affected ice levels on Vermont lakes. In parts of the state, the ice was never sound enough to fish on.

More than one angler we talked to spoke of an odd disconnect, because the weather during the day didn’t feel too warm – it felt like the lakes should be making The weather team at NBC5 News calculated that 2024 ice. And yet an exceedingly warm saw the cloudiest January since 1951.

December, followed by a lack of v e r mon t al m anac | vol u m e v

BRATTLEBORO HISTORICAL SOCIETY

January 27, 2024, in Brattleboro: not much snow or ice, but lots of clouds. radiational cooling at night in January, kept ice levels below the four-inch mark that’s generally considered safe.

Habib Sabet, writing in Vermont Digger, interviewed Matt Trombley, a Vergennes-based fishing

guide who said he didn’t take anyone out for the entire month in Rutland County. “I had people calling left and right in January,” Trombley said. “I told them we don’t have any ice – in the middle of January – and they were like, ‘Excuse me?’”

We looked back at our weather summaries from the past four volumes of the Vermont Almanac and saw that January 2023 was the warmest ever experienced in Vermont; January 2022 was a significantly colder than average month; January 2021 and January 2020 were both warm without being extreme. stor ie s f r om & f or t h e l an d

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e An Elegy of Sorts

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n Volume II of Vermont Almanac we ran a picture of an American chestnut flower, which is, of course, an unusual sight. In the early twentieth century, a pathogenic fungus from Asia effectively wiped out the species. By the 1940s an estimated 4 billion trees were dead nationwide. You can still find chestnut stump sprouts growing from their parents’ root system, but they rarely grow bigger than your wrist before the blight reinfects them. The tree seen here had somehow made it to 50 or 60 years old – it was growing on an overgrown lot next to Claude Horde’s house in North Bennington. Unfortunately, shortly after the picture was taken, the tree succumbed.

The tree had been standing dead for over a year when I went to visit Claude this past

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January. He’d bought the vacant lot and was clearing it so he could make a vegetable garden. When I asked if I could cut the chestnut and try to salvage some of the wood, he told me I was welcome to do so and that he’d even help me load it. It was an ugly tree, form-wise, but it would open up nicely: creamy yellowbrown – like oak mixed with butternut mixed with locust – with some orange in the heart that may have been stained by the blight itself. The sculptural slabs were both timepieces that evoked a past era and art pieces that evoked the ecologically tragic consequences of global commerce. As we loaded the wood Claude talked about a friend of his who owns an airplane, and the friend swears there’s a whole valley full of chestnuts deep in the Green Mountains no one knows about. Fly over them in July and the canopy is white with

healthy blossoms. It’s such a lovely image that even my cynical inner journalist, who wanted to interrogate the idea, smiled wistfully.

Dave Bushee of Shaftsbury milled the wood and eked out every bit of yield he could. The half-rotten trunk was slabbed.

Part of the upper bole made a series of short, four- to six-inch boards. Dave cut some of the branches at an angle for trivets and I kept some in the round for turnings.

In May the Bennington County Conservation Commission was giving away free hybrid chestnut seedlings that had been vole damaged.

These seedlings were the offshoots of an American Chestnut Foundation breeding program, where they bred an American chestnut with a blightresistant Chinese chestnut, selected the most blight-resistant offspring, then backcrossed with more American chestnuts over

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generations. The resulting seedlings are 90-something percent American chestnut, and hopefully there’s enough blight resistance in the Chinese genes to allow the tree a reasonable life.

When things slowed down I brought a trivet and one of the hybrid chestnuts over to Claude. He’d finished clearing the lot and had exposed an old foundation of a house that had burned ages ago. I guess the house would have had the original chestnut growing in the yard. I left the seedling near where the old tree had been growing next to an oldfashioned bicycle that had fake flowers and a buck skull in a basket on the front of it.

I don’t know that there’s a deeper meaning to any of this.

—Dave Mance III

with its small leaves and widely spaced, wickedlooking thorns, hawthorn (genus Crataegus) looks like

it’s preparing to defend itself from an elephant, which may not be far off. Since deer can easily fit their slim muzzles in-between the thorns, the tree probably developed them as a defense against the ground sloths and mastodons that roamed North America during the Pleistocene era. These extinct animals probably browsed by engulfing entire branch ends, as existing elephants do – in Africa, plants with small leaves and thorns do best against this kind of herbivory. And so hawthorn seems to be fighting the last war, as they often say about human conflicts.

mourning doves almost always come to the birdfeeder in flocks . At this

time of year they stick closely together, night and day, a situation that will change as the breeding season approaches. At home throughout the country, this species is probably America’s most abundant bird.

Although estimates of the total population vary widely, it’s in the hundreds of millions. At 3 to 5 billion, the passenger pigeon once had a population easily more than 10 times that of the mourning dove, despite being present only east of the Rocky Mountains. American chestnuts were a main part of their fall diet.

These extinct passenger pigeons were roughly twice the size of the mourning dove, but watching our tight flocks of sleek birds swoop in and out provides a reminder, admittedly a faint one, of their bygone relatives. —Virginia Barlow stor ie s f r om & f or t h e l an d

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Eight Tips for Designing Your Wood-Fired Sauna

t began with an old Vermont Castings woodstove, relegated to the garage when a newer stove was installed.

It was soon joined by a failed double-pane picture window, with moisture seeping between the panes. From these humble spare parts, a sauna was born.

Some of us are born to sweat.

This tendency might be genetic, or it might be learned. My suburban childhood home had a sauna, which my father had built after repeated business trips to Scandinavia. Indeed, I have photos of him and his business bros in Helsinki, circa 1970, standing around naked after a good sweat.

Since leaving home, through multiple moves and multiple states, I always wanted a sauna.

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And I know I’m not alone.

Many Vermonters nourish a sauna fantasy. Having fulfilled that fantasy more than a decade ago, I am pleased to share what I’ve learned. the research is the most f un .

The woods are filled with saunas. Just by asking around, I found four in my small community. When I visited them, I took photos and measurements, asked for advice, and in one case joined the owners for a sweat.

These saunas were all functional but not fancy. In most cases, they had been built from random lumber and, like mine, a second-hand stove. The tour taught me a lot.

where are you taking off your clothes ?

We built ours about 50 paces from the house, which is a great idea in case it burns to the ground (more on that later). An important question: Are you stripping down inside your house and then running through the snow in your bathrobe? Or would you prefer an attached changing room? I’ve seen both designs and definitely recommend a changing room. overdo it on the insulation .

We used 2x6 studs to allow for more insulation – R40 Rockwool batts – in the walls. Same with the ceiling. Don’t use foam insulation panels because the extreme heat will degrade them.

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prioritize air circulation .

Yes, you want a well-insulated space … and it also needs to breathe, because saunas get moist. We created four points of air flow on different sides of the room: one-inch gaps at the top and bottom of the door to the changing room, a small window that opens to the outdoors, plus a vent hole in the wall near the base of the stove. splurge on cedar .

The smell of cedar is one of the great pleasures of a sauna.

We used Vermont white cedar shiplap for the walls and ceiling, plus western red cedar for the benches; it’s denser and the grain is more consistent, which means you’re less likely to get splinters in your butt. windows can work .

don ’ t burn it down !

The danger zone is where the stovepipe passes through the ceiling and the roof. Get a well-insulated chimney pipe and someone who knows how stor ie s f r om & f or t h e l an d

PHOTOS BY ANDY ROBINSON

Let the light in! The concern: the difference between interior and exterior temperatures – think of those sub-zero winter nights – will crack the glass.

It’s been a dozen years, and our double-pane window has held up well. However, for extra safety, we built a removable wooden window cover that can be placed against the window on the inside and provides additional insulation (and glass protection) on those really cold days.

to install it. Our sauna required an intricate calculation to route the stovepipe through the ceiling joints while maintaining sufficient distance between the stove and the walls around it. make it your own .

Our carpenter, Dan, who owns an old schoolhouse, built the hearth from slate chalkboards.

(Slate conducts heat, so we

backed it with Rockwool.) I carved wooden clothes hooks from a downed ash tree. The changing room includes a drop-down desk, where I occasionally work. It’s your sauna, so do what you will.

Sweating in the sauna one snowy day, a friend turned to me and said, “This could change my relationship with winter.” —Andy Robinson

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Logging and Humility

he feller-buncher’s saw whines, its pitch lowering as it tears through column after column of living wood. With each cut the clearing widens, the massive machine pushing back the walls of the forest. Behind it, the skid trail curls through the patch cut like the trunk of an ancient oak, splitting and branching, stacks of felled trees feathering it like leaves. The feller-buncher reaches for another tree and another, gathering flowers into a giant bouquet.

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It is August 2017. Only one month ago, I became the owner of this land, and already I am changing it forever. I watch the machines work with my heart in my throat, wondering if I am doing the right thing. two weeks earlier , I had climbed the main skid trail, my orange vest

packed with flagging tape and tree-marking paint, my paint gun bumping against my thigh. It was a familiar beginning to a day in the woods. For years, I worked as a consulting forester on private lands in Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine. Countless mornings began just like this: with a walk down some old skid trail, the weight of a gallon of tree-marking paint tugging at my shoulders, my paint gun at my side.

I do not know how many trees I have marked in my young life – tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands. When I began, each tree was a bitter sacrifice, a dagger to my heart. The more time I spent in the woods, the more I understood that each tree was a pixel in a photograph, a tiny piece of a forest community with its own life to live, a world of billions of creatures that reach toward the future together. I learned that the cutting of a tree can be an act of responsibility, an expression of compassion. I learned that the death of a tree is a small price to pay to help a community move forward with grace.

Though I had carried the paint gun through thousands of acres of forest, though I had supervised dozens of logging jobs, though I had advised hundreds of landowners, this was not someone else’s land, not some distant forest. This was Bear Island – my land, a place I would spend my life protecting, a place that would someday be my home. I felt as uncertain as the first time that I held the paint gun, its cover shiny and new. i turned onto an old skid trail – a narrow, faded track cutting

across the slope. It led me into a stand of diseased beech, a generation of twisted and stunted trees overtopping a sea of beech saplings. Thirty years before, this was a stand of red oak, the beech creeping up through the understory. Thirty years before, loggers had high-graded the mountain: cutting the oak and releasing the beech, sending this stand spinning into an endless cycle of beech growth, decline, and mortality.

I pulled a roll of orange flagging from my vest and began marking the perimeter of the beech stand. I had a plan: I would start over, cutting the diseased beech trees and their clones, allowing a new generation of trees to regenerate in their place, giving this forest the chance to reach toward diversity again. Slowly, I marked the boundaries of a patch cut, an acre of trees that would soon be gone.

The air was warm and dry, a perfect July morning. As I encircled the beech stand, I had no desire to dominate this forest, to control it, to force it to conform to some idealized image. More than anything, I wanted the forest on the mountain to be itself: beautiful and wild, free to go its own way. I believed that this forest, its creatures, its patterns and processes, its relationships and connections, had intrinsic value – the right to exist. I knew that the best and most vital parts of this living system could not be engineered, that they must create themselves. I also knew that, in this moment, they needed my help.

Bear Island spread around me like a broken star. Life hid under every leaf, stor ie s f r om & f or t h e l an d

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birds fluttering from branches, trees and plants filling the holes in the world.

Bear Island had been cleared and maintained as a pasture for a century, had been high-graded and exploited in the century that followed. Now it was forced to respond to a changing climate, to nonnative pests and pathogens, to deer overpopulation, to countless other iterations and manifestations of global change. After millennia of adaptation and change, this forest was forced to hold too many things at once – I could almost feel it straining against the limits of its resilience.

I hung the last piece of orange flagging and turned inward, fighting through the beech brush to the center of the patch cut. Among the diseased beech, I found a few beacons of hope: a red oak, a white pine, a serviceberry. I lifted my paint gun, marking each healthy tree with a bright blue x. In a month, these trees would stand alone in a field of stumps. In the years ahead, they would be legacy trees, elders standing in crowds of children. Across decades, they would witness this forest’s regeneration, a living community reborn from the depths of loss. As the forest of the future rose around them, I hoped that they would bear witness to a profound transformation; that their seeds would fall on fertile ground, that their children would spread roots into the deepening soils of a better world. a d eer c ro s s ed t h e t r a i l in front of me, shining in her summer

coat. In a flash, I remembered my first hunting season, more than a decade ago, crosshairs tremoring over a doe as she flowed through an autumn forest. I remembered raising the rifle, smooth and hard in my young hands, remembered its wooden stock pressing coldly against my cheek. I remembered lowering it, raising it, lowering it again. I remembered the sound of my ragged breath as the doe faded into the autumn forest, my mind flooded with shame. It was not until many years later that I learned that I could love deer and kill deer, that I could love trees and kill trees, and that to do so could be an act of courage and compassion.

I held this forest in the crosshairs now, my hands trembling. As the acorns hung like brown jewels from the oaks, the biosphere withered around me; its brilliance fading, species everywhere declining and fading out of existence.

As the forest on the mountain grew and changed, the world was degraded both by people who did too much and by those who did nothing. I was afraid of failing in my responsibility toward this forest, this forgotten treasure still shining goldenly on the mountain. I was afraid of failing the forests and the people of the world, the children blinking into existence on this summer day.

I reached for the humility to accept that the choices I made would always be flawed, that I would always take some steps forward and some steps back.

I reached for the humility to wade in the waters of uncertainty, to recognize that the duality of right and wrong would never do my choices justice. I was learning that there were no easy answers to fight for, but that we must fight anyway. I was learning that if we wait to be certain, if we demand perfection, we will do nothing at all. I wondered if it was humility, not certainty, that would help me be a true steward of this forest: if it would help me do what was necessary to protect this precious thing; if it would help me have the vision to change.

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The author with a beech tree on his 175-acre Bear Island property in Bolton. stor ie s f r om & f or t h e l an d

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The forest on the mountain leaned over me, bright and hard and stark, blue sky stretched over towering rock. It was a system that thrived on both efficiency and inefficiency – both harmonious and disharmonious, both altruistic and individualistic. The beauty of the forest was carried not in one simple truth but in a trillion unimaginable realities. So many opposite things thrived in the forest without contradiction. So many disparate things were true.

I watched the orange flagging bob in the breeze. As I looked over my work I felt no satisfaction, only the weight of a profound responsibility. Once, it would have been enough to leave this forest alone. Now, to do so would be an act of negligence. the feller - buncher sends another bouquet of trees whistling to

the ground. I stand in the burning light of a new patch cut, listening to the crashing and the grinding of the machines. The feller-butcher’s saw is a blur, severing wood layered over decades in a second, changing the forest forever in the blink of an eye.

Below me, the highway hums through the divided floodplain, connecting the fragmented pieces of the broad valley. A train rushes east, blowing its horn. In a world marked by so many monuments to human power, it takes humility to admit that we are dependent on so many things that our incredible technology cannot replace or control. Even as our technology advances and our intelligence grows, even as our cities rise into the sky, even as we infiltrate and alter every natural community on earth, we remain reliant on ecosystems for the air that we breathe, the water that we drink, the food that we eat, the delicate climate that we inhabit. As far as we have come, we are still tethered to ecosystems – we cannot, and will not, live without them.

The grapple-skidder turns, blowing black smoke into the summer woods. We already have the power to save this living world and to save ourselves in the process. Our challenge is to find the humility to recognize the preciousness of ecosystems and to access the vision to protect them. The future of this forest, of every ecosystem on earth, of our own species, will be written by the choices that we make: the way we manage ecosystems and the way we manage ourselves – the way we change them, the way we change ourselves. the log landing is the surface of an alien planet, barren and empty,

shadows leaning ominously. For weeks the landing was a hive of activity, an unending crush of trucks and chippers and skidders. Now it is quiet again, filled only with a ringing, buzzing void. I pull on my orange vest and begin to climb the main skid trail, the smell of turned earth filling my body.

The main trail winds through the first patch cut, an acre of naked oaks and scarred earth. I walk in silence, sweat stinging my eyes, acorns sliding beneath my boots. The more that I work to protect and to care for ecosystems, the more I recognize this feeling: the emptiness that follows a profound compromise.

The trail is chafed and roughened, its orange mineral soil exposed by the metal tracks of the feller-buncher, the chain-wrapped tires of the skidders, the dragging bodies of trees beyond counting. Over the last month, the loggers’ machines cut thousands of trees and dragged them to the landing, where they were sliced into timber, pulp, firewood, and chips, loaded onto trucks, carried 97

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away. I had watched the loggers work, feeling both the weight of so many endings and the promise of so many new beginnings.

The wood that the loggers pulled from the mountain would never be deadwood on the forest floor, would never be habitat for spotted salamanders, would never be nourishment for the trees or the fungi of the forest. And yet I know that, somewhere, the wood is becoming something radical and beautiful and lifegiving after all: somewhere, it is being transformed into energy, into heat, into shelter, into beautiful things. Somewhere it is helping to nourish people who deserve to have warmth and shelter, to feel freedom and joy and hope.

Somewhere, it is a renewable resource in a world where the extraction and use of nonrenewable resources threatens the vitality of the biosphere, its species and its peoples, its waters and its trees, its salamanders and its fungi.

I cross through another patch cut. What a strange world this is, I think. If I wished, I could live my life without feeling the true impact of my choices. I could say “not in my backyard” to logging while consuming resources that cause untold harm to ecosystems, to species, to peoples across the world. If I wished, I could fight for the illusion of preservation: for the comfort of myself and the subjugation of those without the privilege of saying “not in my backyard.”

It is humbling to recognize that our lives will always come at a cost: that we will always need energy, will always need food and shelter. We will always consume to survive, and our consumption will always impact this biosphere. We cannot choose if we want to impact ecosystems, if we want to impact peoples across the globe, if we want to impact the lives of future generations. Our only choice is: What do we want our impact to be? We will make these choices with our eyes open, or we will make them with our eyes closed.

Across a smoldering patch cut, I can see Honey Hollow creasing the western mountains, the secret valley of Gleason Brook, the high crest of the sitting-place mountain. An ancient yellow birch is a bronze statue in the patch’s center, the shattered stumps of beech saplings like corn stubble at its feet. Through so much death, I know that Bear Island is at the beginning of a profound transformation, that it is in the process of becoming something new. I watch clouds drift over the mountains and dream of this forest as it may someday be. Decades from now, I will walk through this patch cut, my hands worn and callused, my face creased by watersheds of smile lines. I will rest my hand on the shining trunk of a young oak and remember, distantly, the emptiness of this moment.

Through the scorching silence, I hear the words of the poet William Stafford: “Your job is to find out what the world is trying to be.”

I believe that this forest is trying to be vibrant and healthy, alive and changing, resilient and abundant.

I believe that this forest cannot be planned and regulated, that it cannot live in captivity. I believe that this world must create itself, and I believe it will not become what it is trying to be on its own.

Dusk rolls over the mountain. I untether my mind and let it drift through dreams of hope.—Ethan Tapper Excerpted with permission from How to Love a Forest, Copyright © 2024 Broadleaf Books stor ie s f r om & f or t h e l an d

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IMAGES COURTESY OF BILL PENDERGRAFT

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urricane Matthew was shooting up the Southeast coast, and our house was a target. We had been living in our cottage on a popular tidal river for many years. With each blow, we estimated the disaster potential, deciding whether to stay or flee. Matthew looked like a “flee hurricane” as it was building strength and would make landfall near us. Our old rickety cottage was only 13 feet above sea level, and we expected an 8- to 10-foot storm surge, so we imagined losing at least the porch, and if the wind forecast of 100 miles per hour proved true, perhaps the roof.

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Moving Home We drove 100 miles upstate to a friend’s house.

Returning the next day, we found the road washed out, limbs driven through our windows, the moss-draped live oaks that we cherished stripped of their leaves, and the yard full of seaweed.

After a month of chainsaw work, trucking out debris, and making home repairs, we drove to visit our daughter in Vermont, with whom we had tromped around the state over the years. We camped in Underhill State Park on the west side of Mt. Mansfield.

Over freeze-dried risotto and a Thermos of tea, my wife and

I discussed our retirement options. The next morning, stumbling up the Sunset Ridge Trail to the summit and looking through the clouds over Lake Champlain, we made the decision to sell our coastal cottage and move to Vermont. We knew well that Vermont was not without storms; however, we wanted to leave the coast, live close to our daughter, and spend time outdoors in a beautiful place.

We wanted elevation.

For the next several years, we thumbed through ads for an affordable house with land in the Northeast Kingdom; we eventually found a little offv e r mon t al m anac | vol u m e v

grid house with a woodstove and, more importantly, forestland where we could hike and enjoy wildlife. Plus, the land was enrolled in the Current Use program, necessary for us to make a larger land purchase affordable through reduced property taxes.

We knew we had no intention of developing it.

Our new home was 100plus acres of forestland. As we made the transition we read every book we could find about New England forestry, as we knew more about shrimp-baiting than forest management. We bought the Vermont Almanac, subscribed to Northern Woodlands magazine, and talked to neighbors. Our goal was to care for our forest and its wildlife while not becoming lost in the woods.

One of our tracts was largely hardwood, while the other was mainly softwood, and both contained elevations over 2,000 feet. As we spent

Learning about forest and wildlife management at a Vermont Coverts training workshop. days bushwacking around the land, we only had more questions. Why were there dense areas of dead and dying trees, mostly among softwoods?

We had seen grouse, turkey, squirrels, rabbits, and the tracks of various animals, but what animals should we encourage?

What was the best plan for the

Forester Ryan Kilborn and others assisted as we planted, mulched, and protected 200 red oak seedlings. stor ie s f r om & f or t h e l an d

vernal pool we found? How should we manage the streams meandering through the properties, one flowing into the Winooski headwaters and the other to the Connecticut?

We began to talk with our neighbors near and far. Our neighbor Gary Gulka was a biologist for the Vermont Department of Environmental Conservation and had been living on the land south of us since 1983. He knew our land well, as his planning included adjacent land, and he shared our interest in native plants and animals. As we walked together, he described his property as a place that greened up early in spring and was an important feeding area for wildlife. He had seen moose, fisher, bobcat, black bear, and a wide variety of migratory warblers each year – birds he could name!

Another neighbor, Tim McKay, who had been

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managing his land nearby for more than 40 years, walked our land and invited us to visit his property, where we were introduced to the Family Forest Carbon Program, an organization designed to support carbon sequestration on small tracts of land. We discussed his Christmas tree plantation and his passion for growing big trees. He led us to understand that managing the forest to encourage one species of wildlife might be detrimental to others. We should work toward diversity and let wildlife find a niche on its own.

Our neighbors introduced us to Vermont Coverts, a peer-to-peer network of over

My wife, Jeanne, at work during the oak-planting project.

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Neighbor Tim McKay with his grandchildren in the woods he has been managing for more than 40 years.

900 landowners who help each other in the management of their land for wildlife, and we later attended their training sessions. Through Coverts, I connected with Susan Houston and learned of her journey to help create the Craftsbury Conservation Commission, while serving on the local selectboard. Like Susan, we found that many of our neighbors who were part of Coverts also volunteered their time in their communities

and supported conservation planning.

To learn more about the animals on our land and to include their protection in our forestry plan, we reached out to Andrea Shortsleeve at the Vermont Fish and Wildlife Department. She visited our land several times, introduced us to the Biofinder website to help us understand how our forest fit into the network of natural communities in the state, and helped us build

Inspecting a big beech with UVM Forestry’s Tony D’Amato. v e r mon t al m anac | vol u m e v

protected areas into our plans.

They included the management of our vernal pool – important to frogs and salamanders – open areas for native pollinators, the control of invasive plants, and a strategy to manage our ash trees which were threatened by the emerald ash borer.

Following recommendations from other landowners, we met Ryan Kilborn of Meadowsend Consulting. Ryan is a UVM Forestry graduate who had been working with landowners for years. He wrote a management plan, which involved mapping our land, with recommendations for patch cuts to open dense areas for new growth, helping both the next generation of trees and the wildlife that prefers regeneration. We also had a large area of white spruce on the property that was dead and dying. Spring winds were blowing down trees in the area, and he recommended removing the spruce and planting climate-resilient red oaks.

Our completed forestry plan contained recommendations for harvesting and protecting sensitive areas. After the plan was reviewed by our county forester, we began to put sweat into our projects. That winter, logging on frozen ground, patch cuts were made to open the canopy, and the white spruce was removed.

The following spring (with the help of others) we planted and mulched 200 bareroot red oaks, protecting them from deer browsing with wire stor ie s f r om & f or t h e l an d

Laying the plastic for our native wildflower plantings.

Post-logging view of a patch cut undertaken to open a dense area for the next generation of trees. cages. Though an uncommon practice, we dragged several hundred feet of hose into the area and watered every new tree during dry periods. We also overcropped our open meadow with buckwheat, followed by the planting of native wildflowers.

In retrospect, after four years in Vermont, I think that when we left the coast for the forest, we weren’t escaping something so much as moving towards something. Perhaps that something was actually a return to our youth, which

had included growing up in a rural place where we worked with our neighbors, where there was plenty of forestland surrounding us, where development was minimal, where there were dirt roads, and where pastimes might be more about watching migrating birds return than scrolling social media. In fact, as I write, two phoebes who may very well have overwintered near our southern cottage, are now feeding their young in their nest on our porch. —Bill Pendergraft

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Who Owns Vermont’s Forests?

s a private forest owner, owning a forest is a concept that haunts me a little.

Mine. Not yours. Or in the public’s mind, Yours. Not mine. Nearly 70 percent of Vermont’s forestland is privately owned (20 percent is publicly owned and the remaining 10 percent is owned by corporations). That means that my family’s 80 acres is representative of the majority of Vermont’s woodlands. I take my responsibility as a steward very seriously. I believe most private woodland owners make decisions with the greater good in mind, though there are as many different versions of what it means to do good as there are forest owners. That diversity, that decentralized decision making, is an important characteristic of forest management in Vermont.

The Vermont family forest owner is not an easy archetype to figure. But many try: most notably the folks behind the Forest Inventory Analysis, the Family Forest Research Center, and the National Woodland Owner Survey. From these resources, generalizations and trends can be sussed out. For example, the research shows that 80 percent of Vermont family forest owners consider wildlife as an important factor, while only 20 percent consider timber important. In fact, the top seven reasons that Vermonters cite for owning their forestland have nothing to do with resource extraction or income. On average, things like beauty, privacy, and nature are the top reasons for owning land.

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While this feels intuitive to me, it would be difficult for any survey to adequately distill what it is about my land or my ownership that I consider “important.” In the 10 years I have owned my property, I haven’t sold timber (yet), but I have cut at least 75 cords of firewood. My love of bird song, the physical wellness I feel after a hike, and the idea of ecological integrity are among my top reasons for owning land, but I’ve also harvested deer, grouse, and squirrel; picked buckets of oyster mushrooms; made gallons of syrup; and joyously ran my ATV through our trails. So extractive, utilitarian uses are unequivocally among my top reasons for owning land, too. These truths coexist without conflict.

While it’s difficult to articulate why people choose to own forestland, it’s easier to pinpoint the challenges they face in doing so. The top concern reported by Vermont family forest owners in surveys involves paying property taxes, so while financial motivations are not among the top reasons for owning forestland, the top concern does have to do with the economics of ownership.

Timber revenue, of course, helps pay for some of the land’s carrying cost. But again, conflicting truths can coexist. Of the many timber sales I’ve been engaged in as a consulting forester, only one landowner made it clear they wanted to cut trees to pay an over-due tax bill. I don’t doubt taxes are a top concern; I’m only pointing out that in my experience they don’t drive landowner actions. v e r mon t al m anac | vol u m e v

PHOTOS: VERMONT WOODLANDS ASSOCIATION

Most Vermont woodlot owners report being more motivated by opportunities for recreation and protecting water quality, forest health, and wildlife habitat than by timber sales.

Even in the one example I cite, the landowner was clear that any management should maintain recreational trails and conform with responsible forest stewardship.

The concerns I hear from forest landowners most often have to do with invasive plants, soil and water quality, tree-decimating pests, and wildlife habitat concerns. Last winter I assisted a landowner in Chittenden County with a salvage harvest after major wind events blew acres of their pine over. This summer, a Franklin County resident is working to remove invasive plants and a Lamoille County landowner installed water bars on eroding skid trails to protect soil and water quality. An Addison County landowner enrolled their land in a carbon market program, committing to let carbon accumulate in the trees and soil. Forest landowners are increasingly focused on forest-health restoration projects these days, whereas in the past things were more myopically focused on timber management. This is not to say timber isn’t still a slice of the pie, it’s just getting to be a bigger pie.

It’s increasingly challenging these days to make a timber harvest successful. Equipment trends larger, weather trends wetter. The value of wood trends lower and the cost of logging trends upward. This is compounded by harvesting prescriptions and methods that are more and more incompatible with the ways landowners are enjoying their forest. This divergence has stor ie s f r om & f or t h e l an d

and will continue to shift cultural attitudes. It’s no wonder that 30x30 land/water conservation polices, carbon markets, preservation funding, recreational trends, and old-growth restoration are increasingly becoming part of the forest stewardship milieu.

On my property and with the landowners I work with, I feel the divergence. It even stings a little to watch it. But the evolution we’re seeing stems from engagement. Vermonters are more likely to have a management plan, more likely to get and ask for professional advice, and more likely to have participated in stewardship activities in the last five years than forest landowners nationally.

The actual tree cutting I do on my land takes only a few days a year. The restorative stewardship activities take up the rest of my woods time, energy, and money. This year, I installed a new round of water bars on my trails ahead of Tropical Storm Betty’s pounding rains, planted a few apple trees, put a dozen deer enclosures around choice maples and oaks, cut probably hundreds of small trees in a forest stand improvement project, pulled invasive plants, and girdled a few hemlocks to increase the amount of available wildlife snags. These types of activities occur on family forest lands throughout Vermont on scales big and small each year. I can’t quite see any other way to do it. If I’m taking, I’m also giving. Probably mostly giving. Most of the Vermont family forest owners I know believe this is not only possible, it’s a requisite. —Allan Thompson

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Winter Talk Ed Petrie, bachelor mechanic, says, Heaven is holding a wrench in my hand, but I wasn't much good at school.

The wind-chill is well below zero.

We talk by his wood stove, Jacket shawled around his shoulders.

Put insulation in to warm the place up, and then the mice come and put the insulation where they like it…Last fall, it was chipmunks stuffed an exhaust pipe in the pickup outback.

When I started it up, it blew a hole in the muffler.

No, it won’t be 80 in here till it’s 50 outdoors.

Ed turned 85 the day before I came.

He smiles at our cake.

How did you celebrate?

I warmed the blankets, he laughs, pointing to the bedroom around the corner from what’s now the kitchen where he was born. Hibernating.

Yes. The winter torpor.

I am happy to gather his language easy as laundry and read it back someday soon. He will say It is nothing… killing the afternoon.

And coming home my kitchen smells like his— wood-smoked wool, and old.

—Verandah Porche

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w e a t h e r

R Warm and Dry

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fter low-snow months in December and January, many of us were hopeful that a decent snowpack would finally arrive in February. It wasn’t to be. According to the Northeast Regional Climate Center, Vermont had its second-driest February on record.

That’s not to say the weather wasn’t active, though. A pair of high-wind events in early February produced significant wind damage focused mostly along the western side of the Green Mountains. Gusts of 79 to 90 miles per hour were reported. There were widespread reports of sugarbush damage. On the evening news, there was a story about a farmer who’d lost greenhouses in the hurricane-force winds.

A big warm-up occurred from February 8 to 11. Temperatures peaked at 60 degrees in Bennington. Burlington and Montpelier set record highs in that stretch. Sugarmakers who weren’t still out cutting trees off mainlines made their first syrup then. Temperatures dropped back to normal and meandered around the mean for

another two weeks, before shooting up again into the upper 50s and lower 60s at the end of the month. Early-rising perennials started poking out of flower beds. Bears started raiding garbage cans again, and folks wondered if they’d even hibernated this year.

When all was said and done, weather stations around Vermont, including in Burlington, Rutland, Montpelier, and St. Johnsbury, all reported monthly temperature averages that were around 7 degrees warmer than the average of the last 30 years. And the high-low phenomenon continued. In Underhill, on eight nights in February, the low temperature was near or above the average high temperature.

If we lump February in with January and December – those three months comprise “meteorological winter” – we shattered the all-time warmest winter record. In fact, the lower 48 states collectively had the warmest winter in 130 years of record-keeping, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.Temp-

warmest winter on record for contiguous states DECEMBER 2023

FEBRUARY 2024

Difference from average temperature (ºF)

Difference from average temperature (ºF)

NOAA CLIMATE.GOV DATA NCEI

JANUARY 2024

Difference from average temperature (ºF) -11

0

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-11

0 11 Compared to 1991–2020

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0

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We looked back at our weather summaries from the past four volumes of the Vermont Almanac and saw that February 2023 was significantly warmer than normal. February 2022 was notable for a substantial ice storm. February 2021 was a low-snow year in northern Vermont but a deep-snow year in southern Vermont.

February 2020 was a wobbly polar vortex year.

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MARY DODGE

eratures were more than five degrees Fahrenheit hotter than average during that period.

We mentioned that Burlington never got below zero in January, and after failing to get there in February, the winter of 2024 became just one of a handful when the Queen City never hit that milestone. Over the course of meteorological winter, 64 out of 91 days in Burlington were above freezing.

Lake Champlain, not surprisingly, never froze. According to the Lake Champlain Basin Program’s 2024 State of the Lake Report, the entire surface of Lake Champlain froze over nearly every year in the early 1900s. It now freezes completely approximately once in every five years.

Modeling suggests that by 2050, the lake’s surface may completely freeze just once per decade.

This bear was out and about in Cornwall on February 27. Note the bare ground.

DAVE MANCE III

This 14-inch-diameter tree limb was ripped off by the February wind, fell 40 feet, and speared the mainlines below it like a javelin. The hole it left in the ground was more than 30 inches deep.

This was taken in Shaftsbury – note the bare ground. stor ie s f r om & f or t h e l an d

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JOHN PECKHAM

once in a while a

snowshoe hare leaves a

really good footprint. This print of its hind feet was in about a half-inch of slush on a driveway. When I first saw it, I thought a big dog had been in the neighborhood. The car key shown here is just over two inches long. I estimated the track of one paw to be fourand-a-half inches long and a bit over three inches wide – this from an animal that weighs just three to four pounds.

—Virginia Barlow

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2023-24 Winter Bird Report

ermont eBirders (ebird.org) documented some unusual Vermont bird sightings over the winter. Funnily enough, two of the most unusual birds to visit the state were found in suburban cul-de-sacs — not precisely what most people consider ideal bird habitat. An orange-crowned warbler was seen frequenting a bird feeder array in Essex Junction (see photo above), wintering much farther north than others of its kind. An even bigger surprise was the discovery of an ash-throated flycatcher in Middlebury, the first Vermont record for this species! This colorful flycatcher is native to the southwestern US and Mexico but is known to wander into the Northeast occasionally.

Many cycles influence bird distribution and abundance in winter.

Everything from mast crops (acorns, beechnuts, and other cyclically produced foods) to El Niño climate patterns play a part in where and when certain species can be found. A group of birds particularly tied to these ever-shifting cycles are the so-called winter finches – species abundant some years in the state and nearly absent in others.

During the winter of 2023-24 we saw an influx of red crossbills, a finch species that prefers the seeds of conifers, while other winter finches such as evening grosbeaks and common redpolls were reported much more sporadically over the winter months. Another irruptive species with a preference for fruits, the Bohemian waxwing, also had a banner year in Vermont. —Nathaniel Sharp v e r mon t al m anac | vol u m e v

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Hibernation Light

n February 1931, the Journal of Mammology published a “Calendar of Disappearance and Emergence of Hibernating Mammals in Wells River, Vermont.” The data were collected by “an observer who with few exceptions was daily in the field,” and showed that the average date that chipmunks retreated into their winter dens was October 24, and the average date of emergence was March 21. These observations fit into the simple hibernation narrative of the time, which is that hibernating animals went to sleep in the fall and woke back up in the spring.

We now know things are a lot more complicated than that with many animal species.

Chipmunks don’t hibernate like a reptile might.

During periods of cold weather they retreat to underground burrows, and they periodically enter a state of torpor, where their bodies cool and suspend most functions. But instead of lasting weeks or months like true hibernation, torpor lasts for hours or days. The chipmunks wake up regularly throughout the winter to eat cached food and go to the bathroom. The depth and the duration of the torpor seems to be directly related to the amount of food that’s available.

This photo, taken on February 21, shows where a chipmunk emerged from its den, presumably to find cached food and go to the bathroom. porcupines of ten feed on the bark and foliage of

small branches .

Watching them sway precariously high above the forest floor, one wonders how the branches support the porcupine’s weight, which can be over 20 pounds. Turns out, it’s not uncommon for porcupines to fall out of trees. One study found evidence of bone fractures in 30 percent of porcupines examined.

—Mike White stor ie s f r om & f or t h e l an d

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Forest Floor Gardening with Ramial Wood

n observant gardener can learn a lot from noting how the forest tends to itself. The uppermost layer of a deciduous forest floor contains decaying leaves, twigs, branches, and logs. This material benefits plant life by reducing moisture loss, minimizing rootzone temperature fluctuations, limiting erosion, and improving overall plant health and resistance to disease. Gardeners and landscapers mimic forest conditions by adding mulch to their cultivated beds, and the prevailing dogma is that mulch serves to build soil organic matter. The benefits don’t end there, though. Mulch also feeds the vitally important organisms that live in the soil, including bacteria, fungi, viruses, nematodes, arthropods, and earthworms. Especially important residents of soil biomass are the arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi. These microbes feed on decaying plant matter and they supply soluble nutrients directly to most plant species via symbiotic invasion of the plant’s roots.

Secreted mycorrhizal fungal glycoproteins (collectively termed glomalin) also facilitate formation of water-stable soil aggregates. Put more simply, the fungi bind soil particles together, which provides shelter 115

for other microorganisms and improves soil friability, leading to better drainage and resistance to mechanical compaction. There’s also an element of carbon sequestration in these processes: A recent peer-reviewed analysis of nearly 200 datasets from around the world showed that up to 70 percent of soil-stored carbon in forests derives from plant roots and root-associated microorganisms.

As researchers have quantified the benefits of mulch, they’ve also focused on how the benefits vary with different types of mulch. In the 1980s and 1990s, the late Professor Gilles Lemieux and his team at the University of Laval in Quebec investigated the practical use of hardwood twigs and branches as a soil supplement for agricultural v e r mon t al m anac | vol u m e v

applications. Lemieux introduced the term “ramial” (referring to radial branches) as a collective term for twigs and tree branches less than 2.5 inches in diameter. Ramial wood is rich in polysaccharides, amino acids, proteins, and other compounds compared to larger-diameter branches and trunk wood, because it serves as a major local nutrient store for emerging leaves and flowers in the tree canopy.

Another important component of ramial wood is the abundant structural plant polymer called lignin. Hardwood tree species contain the syringyl form of lignin, whereas in softwood trees, a different form of lignin (guaiacyl) predominates.

Mycorrhizal fungi more rapidly break down syringyl lignin, and Lemieux and his colleagues were able to show that ramial hardwood applied to the surface of the soil served as a superior source of nutrients

for mycorrhizal growth (compared to the softwood counterpart), with resulting increases in biomass generation and soil formation.

Ramial hardwood can be a free and easily sourced material for anyone seeking to bring the forest’s gift of fertility to their gardens. Fallen or lopped branches less than 2.5 inches in diameter can be collected from roadsides, gathered from lawns or the forest, and cut manually with shears into 2- to 3-inch lengths (or shredded with a chipper). The clipped prunings are then applied directly to the soil surface in a layer as thin as 1 to 2 inches (see photos) in the fall and kept moist over winter with a covering of leaves to hasten decomposition. The ramial wood serves as fungal food as the soil begins to warm in the spring. The fungally produced nutrients are in turn passed to the plants during the growing season. A key

advantage of ramial wood is the moderate carbon-to-nitrogen ratio (similar to hardwood tree leaves at around 30:1), so local soil nitrogen depletion does not occur. By contrast, wood chips containing mixed small- and large-diameter branches and trunk wood may temporarily deplete soil nitrogen, because the carbon-to-nitrogen ratio can be as high as 750:1. In my home garden, I have applied a shallow layer of ramial wood annually for three consecutive years on my raised beds and observed a significant improvement in soil friability, increased biomass (especially earthworms), higher water holding capacity, and enhanced plant health and productivity. This was achieved without application of any additional fertilizer. All that is needed is a layer of ramial wood plus a little wood ash from my fireplace and a handful of homemade compost at planting time. —Brendan Classon

American Agriculturist: for the Farm, Garden, and Household was a rural living publication read by Vermonters in the late 1800s. This particular piece on etiquette was submitted as a letter by “an unfortunate boarder… who has witnessed, at one time or another, the instances of untidiness he recounts.” His wisdom carries through the ages. things not neat

It is not neat to mix bread with a snuff-box on the table, or snuff in the nose; to feed the dog in the frying pan; to use the same sheet for the bed and the table-cloth; to clean the nails with the table-knife, or pick the teeth with a fork; to use the kneading-trough for a cradle; to wash dishes in the hand basin; to put half-chewed quids of tobacco back again for future use; to cook beans without looking them over to pick out the mice (this is cruel also); to use the sleeve for a pocket handkerchief; to use the wash rag for a dish cloth, or the same towel for dishes and hands; to keep cake under the bed; to keep the swill bucket in the pantry, or the swill barrel in the kitchen; to throw dish water out by the back door or slops from the chamber window; to cut plug tobacco with your jack-knife, then pare apples with it, and finish by wiping it upon the hair or the pantaloons. stor ie s f r om & f or t h e l an d

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MILLER FARM

The Miller Farm family: (front row) Cabot, Art, and Judy Miller; (back row) Keith and Tina Franklin, Angela and Pete Miller, Abby and Brandon Bucossi, and Mary and Paul Miller.

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“Grateful We’re Still Here”

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he Miller family has been farming at the corner of Fort Bridgman and Governor Hunt roads in Vernon, Vermont’s southeastern-most town, since 1916. In recent years the enterprise has emerged as one of the state’s more innovative milk producers.

The family owns 275 acres and leases another 117

300 acres or so in the surrounding area. The herd comprises about 440 cows: 260 milking, 20 dry, and 160 young stock, according to Pete Miller, who has spent his 55 years on the farm except for college, where he earned a doctorate in engineering, and a few years working in the tech sector.

The bovines are predominantly Holsteins, most v e r mon t al m anac | vol u m e v

of them registered, “but we have some Jerseys and Brown Swiss, and there are some crosses,” he explains. Asked why the family favored the high-volume Holsteins, as opposed to the Jerseys popular with many other organic farmers, he says the black-and-whites “work well in our system.

But the crosses do well, too. They’re all great cows.

We have a mix of them. I like all cows.”

That system includes both the dairy cows and a small-scale milk-bottling plant, in operation since 2020. Miller says the total labor force amounts to 10 full-time-equivalent workers. “We have some seasonal help. We have some semi-retired help.

There are people who’ve been here so long, they might as well be family.”

It’s a fifth-generation farm,the latest generation being Miller’s daughter, Abigail. She’s joined the operation, he says, “because it’s a labor of love, more than the economic reasons.” Pete, brother Arthur, and their parents own the land, buildings, equipment, and stock. Pete, Arthur, Abigail, and her husband Brandon Bucossi own Miller Milk, which does the bottling and markets/distributes the bottled milk.

Volunteers also help out for the love of the work.

“Very grateful for them,” he emphasizes. “It’s mostly retirees, old guys who want to sit on a tractor.” At the time of our visit in April, the work force also included two interns: a high-schooler doing a work-study stint and a woman in a Wisconsinbased Dairy Grazing Apprenticeship program.

“Unfortunately she’s leaving in a few weeks,”

Miller adds with a hint of regret: in dairy farming these days, employees are hard to find. For the last four years or so, the Millers have brought on willing hands from Mexico and Guatemala. making the numbers work

Between 2012 and 2022, Vermont lost 26 percent of its dairy farm acreage, and 43 percent of its dairy farms. In 2013, only 2 percent of the state’s dairy farms had 700 or more cows. Ten years later that figure had risen to 9 percent.

The trend prompts a question for Miller: in the future, do you expect to keep the same herd size, reduce it, or increase it?

“I don’t know,” he says. “We’ll play it by ear – whatever makes sense at the time. There are compelling reasons to grow, there are compelling reasons to shrink.”

In his view, the problem originates not in a lack of willingness on the part of the next generation, but in the purely economic question of whether dairy farming generates enough income to remain viable – a consideration that largely explains why more dairy farmers have been seeking the economy of scale that bigger operations provide.

Miller says that among organic bulk handlers in his area, Londonderry, New Hampshire-based Stonyfield Farm, which buys most of the Miller farm’s raw milk, generally pays the highest price.

“But it’s not enough,” he notes. “They’re paying under the cost of production.”

C.B. HALL

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For the precise numbers, I contacted Jen Miller (no relation), who directs the farm business development program at the Northeast Organic Farmers Association of Vermont, and she furnished the cold facts: In 2022, the last year for which the numbers had been computed, day-to-day operating costs, including such things as hired labor, feed, bedding, breeding services, utilities, and fuel, averaged $29.27 per “hundredweight” (or 100 pounds of milk produced) for Vermont’s organic dairies. The full cost of production, which also incorporates such items as net capital expenses, investment reserves, and inventory adjustments, brings that total to $40.16. The average price received for the milk came in well short of that figure, at $33.37.

“If we got a fair price, we could afford to pay people a more attractive wage,” Miller continues.

“Labor’s easy when you have abundant money, but we don’t.” new products , new markets

When asked about innovations that have helped the farm survive, Miller mentions the bottling plant first. A farm with its own associated bottling plant is itself unusual these days, and Miller Milk is also trying to be creative in terms of product offerings and markets.

Each fresh cow at Miller Farm yields about 10 gallons of milk a day. About 94 percent of that production goes to Stonyfield for making yogurt.

That leaves 6 percent of the output for the Miller Milk bottling plant, which turns out a variety of retail products, including 1.5-liter bottles of creamline milk for retail sale – this is milk that’s been pasteurized but not homogenized; the cream rises to the top, forming a layer that, the farm’s website tells us, “makes a morning coffee what it ought to be.” Product is shipped from the farm directly to some 15 retail outlets, such as the Brattleboro and Putney food co-ops, as well as distributors. In addition to the creamline milk, the retail product line includes coffee, chocolate, and maple-flavored milks, half-and-half, and heavy cream.

The value-added processing allows Miller Milk to price its product “in such a way as to make a fair wage while doing the processing,” says Miller.

The timing of the bottling plant’s launch proved fortuitous. Rutland’s Thomas Dairy closed in October 2020, sunk in part by the loss of sales to schools cocooned as the pandemic took hold.

“We had just started bottling, and we were small,” Miller recalls. “Thomas had a very big collapse in their market, and for them to downsize was harder than for us to upsize. We got a lot of calls when they closed – it freed up a lot of shelf space for us. When the big fish dies, the little ones on the

NORTHEAST ORGANIC FAMILY FARM PARTNERSHIP / UVM

Innovation has helped Miller Farm reach new markets, including bulk milk in K-12 schools and a partnership with UVM Athletics.

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every dollar counts

Another step toward diversification in the Miller family’s operation is the sale of flowers. Farm Wife Flowers is run by Abigail; Pete’s wife, Angela; and Arthur’s wife, Judy. Now in their third year of business, Pete Miller says, “They’re selling about $20,000 a year of flowers, maybe more.”

They sell the flowers at the farm’s retail stand, through a CSA (community-supported agriculture), and via the farm’s retail-distribution truck.

“They sometimes do a wedding or two,” he adds.

“They also sell to a couple of local florists. Every dollar’s a dollar.”

In some ways, not a lot has changed since stor ie s f r om & f or t h e l an d

MILLER FARM

bottom chew on it. I don’t know what we would have done had Thomas not gone out of business.

We might not still be here.”

Asked if the callers he mentioned were specifically interested in buying organic milk, he answers, “Some were, some weren’t…. But we were local, so that those who were committed to local milk were willing to pay the organic price spread. At that point we didn’t have any milk in schools. It was not part of our business portfolio.”

It certainly is today. Miller Milk’s sales directly to schools represents another new approach.

Packaged in bulk plastic bags, that milk goes into large stainless steel dispensers. At the time of the interview, the enterprise was selling the bags to 12 schools, most of them in nearby Windham County.

And the company has reached beyond the K-12 market. Miller Milk also sells 8- and 16-ounce bottles of milk, of which University of Vermont Athletics buys about 1,200 per week. “The UVM Medical Center takes about 500 weekly,” Miller said. “We have our cream and half-and-half in food service and cafes around the UVM campus.”

Another recent addition is a creemee premix.

“Last year we only released it to Lilac Ridge Farm,” he explained, naming the popular Brattleboro creemee destination, “but this year it will be available through our distributor network.” That comprises Springfield’s Black River Produce, Brattleboro’s Food Connects, Hardwick’s Myers Produce, and Provisions International and Upper Valley Produce, both of White River Junction.

The Miller family has been farming on this land in Vernon for five generations.

Arthur Lyman Miller, Pete’s great-grandfather, acquired the land, in its current dimensions, in 1916 – it’s been a dairy farm ever since. But look deeper and there have been fundamental changes made to keep the farm going. In 2007, the farm’s fourth generation received the USDA organic certification and switched from AgriMark, the bulk conventional-milk handler that includes Cabot Creamery, to Wisconsin-based Organic Valley. In 2016, the farm joined Stonyfield’s roster of shippers. And now it has added direct retail and institutional sales of a variety of dairy products.

So what changes might be in store for the farm’s future? And for dairy farms generally, as they confront the slings and arrows of today’s economics?

Miller terms these questions “a little challenging – kind of like for me to say how to keep small stores going in downtowns in light of Walmart and Amazon.” Part of the answer, he continues, “is based on getting a loyal local customer base who are willing to pay a bit more. And, of course, we hope we can provide better products more reliably, that people can notice a difference in.”

He urges consumers to “Never underestimate the value of how you spend your dollars…. Your willingness to go out of the way and pay a little bit more for local products of any kind really tips the scale toward the local food economy. We’re very grateful to our local customers – grateful we’re still here.” —C.B. Hall

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The Science of Feeding Cows

s a dairy nutritionist for the past 20 years, dairy cows are close to my heart, as are the farmers who tend to them and the land that grows their feed. There is an intimate relationship between animals and plants, and we see this very transparently in the world of dairy production. One doesn’t exist without the other.

Dairy cows are elite athletes, and they need the right nutrition to perform the task set before them at birth. A newborn calf will give birth to her own calf at just 22 to 24 months of age, thereby starting her milk production cycle.

Over the last 20 years, nutrition science and herd management strategies have completely transformed how we formulate nutrition programs. The cow of 20 years ago is not the same cow we have today. Farmers then were happy with cows averaging 75 pounds (8.7 gallons) a day of milk with mediocre fat and protein content. Today, the top-performing herds are producing 95 to 100 pounds of milk per cow each day, with high fat and protein content. As we have refined science and herd management, we have also expanded our knowledge of what these more productive cows really need.

When devising nutrition strategies in the early

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2000s, we focused on just a handful of nutrients.

Looking back, it seems very rudimentary. The days when we relied on net energy lactation values, crude protein percentages, lignin, calcium, and phosphorus percentages are gone. We now discuss carbohydrate fractions (sugar and starch); amino acid requirements instead of crude protein percentages; specific fatty acid values; and the bioavailability and purity of minerals and vitamins in cows’ diets. We’re also focused on digestion rates of feed stuffs, and where these foods digest within the four chambers of a cow’s stomach.

We are concerned about “leaky gut syndrome” and the impact of diet and environmental factors on intestinal health. This leap has been made in a very short time, and we continue to push the boundaries of what good husbandry can deliver.

Track and field athletes have a team to help them run faster and recover faster, and so do dairy cows. Every herd on every farm is different, so dairy nutritionists work with farmers to dial in precise products for their herds. We’re part of the meticulous team of care takers – including the farmer, the veterinarian, and the reproductive consultant – working to help cows achieve and maintain peak health and performance.

It’s a safe bet that the next 20 years of my career will see even higher-producing cows, as the best agricultural universities in the world are focused on understanding better the microbiome of the cow and diving deeper into areas that still need exploring. Optimal dairy production is only attainable with the best care, management, and love for the cows – it’s what dairy farmers, and dairy nutritionists, are focused The author checks in on the calves during a visit to on every single day.

Gervais Farm in Enosburg Falls.

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the barn

A wire fence, tinged with rust, is held at intervals by gray posts sunk deep and holding steady.

The strands of wire meet at right angles to form repeating squares that frame uneven grass, a trough, the hose, and sagging barn.

The water pump hums, into the day, through change of light, and sway of heifers.

Unlike the mesh fence, the barn windows seem to frame a darkness, where missing panes free the path for bats and swallows.

I want to follow them, and though my head is tuned to hesitate, my body finds an opening, and I climb inside. stor ie s f r om & f or t h e l an d

It’s an architecture of the unexpected, of worn planks with gaps and knots.

The old wood composes oddities.

An interior window opens on a small, dark room.

A door with stiff hinges is as narrow as a child, while the one below the hay mow is low and wide.

It must have been nearly summer, when I paused in the barn’s main hall.

In a few days, Willard and Willus, the twin bachelor farmers I couldn’t tell apart, would arrive and unload their wagon.

But on that day, the broad platform was empty of bales, like a waiting stage, lit by a stream of light from a 3 over 3 window high in the gables.

And within that stream, glinted the floating dust of hay and age, like a universe of tiny planets.

Today, I can say, “It was like standing in an apse below a rose window, my crumbling church, both lovely and askew.”

But back then, I simply moved among hidden mice and feral cats.

—Karin Fischer

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Shifting Gears

finding f ulfillment in “ a solid job ” supplying farmers .

PATRICK WHITE

Pre-dawn fill-up: Ryan Sleeper rotates the trailer’s boom toward the already-open lid of the grain silo at the far right; once it’s lined up, he turns on the augers that send feed from the truck to the silo.

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t’s 3:30 a.m., and there isn’t much activity to be seen on the drive south along Route 7 through Charlotte, Ferrisburgh, and Vergennes.

Approaching New Haven, something in the distance looks like a scaled-down city scene, with lights reaching way up in the air like a cluster of miniature skyscrapers. Getting closer, the skyscrapers become huge grain silos. Dairy farmers are notorious early risers, but the folks who supply their feed have them beat. Even in otherwise pitch blackness, the Phoenix Feeds & Nutrition plant is abuzz with activity. In fact, trucks delivering grain to farms on the far side of Boston left hours ago, in the middle of the night, to avoid rush hour traffic.

Up pulls Ryan Sleeper, an ironic name for someone whose days start so early. Today’s route will keep him relatively close to home; he’s delivering feed to farms in St. Albans and then Schuylerville, New York. Sleeper parks his car – an electric Chevy Bolt, recently purchased preowned after a deer broadsided his last car one early morning – in front of his somewhat more powerful work vehicle: a Western Star tractor trailer with 565 horsepower and 1,850 pound feet of torque. Car headlights showing the way, he hops out, climbs in the cab, and fires up the hulking truck to let it warm up. As the diesel rumbles to life, a fellow driver walks by and razzes him: “That EV of yours sure makes a lot of noise!”

After picking up his delivery manifest from the dispatch office, it’s time for a pre-trip inspection: a combination of looking (for anything loose, worn, disconnected) and listening (for any leaks in the hundreds of feet of air and hydraulic hoses snaking under the trailer; for the sound of tires that might be flat when he gives each one a whack). Everything checks out, and the grain trailer has already been filled by the night crew, so it’s time to hit the road. Phoenix has special excess weight permits, so this six-axle truck/trailer can legally haul 99,000 pounds; we’re very near that limit as we pull onto the road.

The Western Star is only six months old and already shows 60,000 miles on the odometer.

From the passenger seat, two things stand out: the air-ride seats are supremely comfortable, and the long-handle shifter you picture being in an 18-wheeler is missing. “It’s an automatic,” says stor ie s f r om & f or t h e l an d

An active day: checking the silo levels requires a climb; unjamming clogs and sweeping out the empty pockets from atop the trailer.

Sleeper. “I was a little worried when I got it that it would be gutless and slow, but it’s got some kick to it.” His previous truck was an 18-speed with a clutch, and he doesn’t miss it.

Sleeper has shifted a few gears in his own life. He has a degree in environmental science from UVM, specializing in aquatic ecology and watersheds, and previously worked for a consulting firm doing remediation work on contaminated sites around the country. He loved the outdoor

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work, but found that, increasingly, his time was spent supervising projects from behind a desk, or writing reports to be read by only a few people.

“That seems to be the career arc in environmental consulting,” he says. After some soul-searching, he tried working as a data scientist at a small Burlington tech firm. He enjoyed the people and the income, but there was still too much time behind a desk. Still no sense that he was really accomplishing something tangible.

Sleeper, a thoughtful guy in his early 30s, hit an inflection point during Covid. “I decided to take six months off,” he recalls. During that time, he did a lot of research on becoming a truck driver.

He learned that the trucking industry is largely controlled by “mega-carriers” – huge freight companies that have reputations for bad schedules, poor pay, and huge turnover among drivers. Not wanting that sort of arrangement, and not interested in driving long hauls around the country, Sleeper began pursuing his CDL through a private school in Milton. During that two-month process, he learned about an opportunity to be a driver for Phoenix. The company was based close to his home in Starksboro, and the idea of delivering critical feed to farms in the Northeast, and the company’s partial employee ownership model, both appealed to him. Phoenix hired him and as soon as he received his CDL, he hit the road for them.

The truck has the requisite CB radio, but these days much more time is spent gleaning information from the tablet computer mounted off the dash, which among other things gives him GPS route information and traffic data. And his phone is also mounted so he can listen to music and, more often, podcasts. “I think I just enjoy learning,” he says.

Sleeper’s work weeks average 60 hours. “I work more hours now, but it doesn’t feel like it,” he says, joking that the first four hours of each day, before the rest of the world wakes up, sometimes don’t feel like they’re happening at all.

One thing he particularly likes: every day is different. He often doesn’t know until the night before where he’s heading the next day. It could be in Vermont; it could be the Adirondacks; it could be Maine. Sometimes he leaves the log cabin that he and his wife, a scientist for the State of 125

Vermont, have fixed up and finds himself a few hours later traveling through downtown Boston.

“I actually don’t mind doing that every once in a while – it’s sort of a challenge,” he says of navigating the city traffic while driving a truck/ trailer that stretches more than 60 feet and stands more than 13 feet tall.

Another like: the farms. Sleeper estimates he’s been to almost 150 of them: “I used to keep track of that on a spreadsheet, but I’m behind on entering names – I was up to 120 about a year ago.” Sometimes he’s alone to unload on the farm and take in the scenery, sometimes he gets to chat with the farmer or a farm hand about the operation.

One farm in Massachusetts always sends him away with some of their chocolate milk. One in Vermont often has some sweet corn for him.

Dislikes: traversing mountain roads when weighing nearly 50 tons. “The road up and down Killington is the worst,” he notes. “I can have it floored and near the peak I’m doing 20 miles an hour, and I’ve got cars backed up behind me.

Going downhill when you weigh that much is even more stressful, and people don’t understand why I’m going so slow, but if I went faster, I’d lose my brakes.”

It’s still dark as we pull into the farm in St. Albans. Across the road from the cow barn is a cluster of grain silos; that’s where we’ll unload.

Sleeper needs to back up to precisely the right spot for the huge auger shoot to end up directly over the top of the first silo. While doing so, he recalls a time in his earlier career when he and some scientist colleagues stopped to get gas in the company RAV4 and were stymied trying to back up the small trailer they were towing. “I think they’re still laughing at us in the gas station,” he guesses. Today, in the dark, he hits the mark with the 40-foot grain trailer on his first try.

The trailer is divided into nine “pockets” that can each haul a different product. Today, eight are filled with Phoenix’s “Hi-Cow” feed (a highprotein mix), and one contains “Fresh-Cow” (for cows that have recently given birth). Phoenix’s nutritionists work with farms to come up with the right mixes for their herds, and each silo at the farm is labeled for a specific product.

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Sleeper, a recreational rock climber, scampers easily up and down the ladders leading to the tops of the silos, where he checks the levels to avoid over-filling them. He also listens to the auger on the truck, to be sure everything sounds right.

Occasionally he climbs on top of the truck to inspect for clogs, “persuading” the material with the handle of a long broom when needed. “Feed with higher fat content is more likely to clog,” he explains. After each compartment empties, he sweeps it down with the broom. Though none are called for on this delivery, he sometimes unloads dozens of 50-pound bags of minerals or feed, which can be transported on a covered rack on one side of the trailer. Even with all the windshield time he racks up, Sleeper figures he’s getting much more activity now than he did at his desk job, a fact he appreciates.

After filling the first silo, he maneuvers the truck to fill another. At the same time, a farm tractor pulling a grain mixer arrives to pick up some of the material that Sleeper has just delivered. Nearby, a front-loader is taking huge

scoops out of the farm’s massive silage pile; this will be mixed with the grain to feed the cows.

It’s daybreak as the last of the feed is emptied from the truck. Following some deliveries, Sleeper will backhaul corn from the farm to the Phoenix plant to be milled. Other times, he will stop along the way to pick up material, like salt, to bring back to the plant. Today, he’s heading straight back to reload for his next delivery.

As we pull out onto the road, the rising sun cuts through the mammoth windshield of the truck.

“This is my favorite part of the job,” says Sleeper of the early morning views. He grew up in New Jersey before coming here for college and says he can’t imagine returning. We roll through the farmland of Franklin County before hitting I-89 and turning south. Cars are starting to fill up the roads, carrying drivers who are just starting their work days. “I feel like there must be a lot of people like me who ended up on a career path that just never sat quite right,” he muses. “I don’t think a lot of people know that there are good jobs like this – solid jobs – around Vermont.” —Patrick White

Ryan Sleeper at the Phoenix Feeds & Nutrition plant in New Haven after reloading and preparing for the second delivery of the day. stor ie s f r om & f or t h e l an d

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Vermont Evaporator Company Born in Central Vermont in 2015, Vermont Evaporator Company makes barrel-style, wood-fired evaporators for the backyard sugarmaker.

“We work hard at showing people how easy it is to make syrup in your backyard. Anyone with access to the trees can do it. And then we try to make the process even easier and more fun!” vermontevaporator.com

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s p o n s o r

VERMONT MAPLE SUGAR MAKERS’ ASSOCIATION Founded in 1893, the Vermont Maple Sugar Makers’ Association is one of the oldest agricultural organizations in the United States. Its membership includes sugar makers big and small, as well as others who are interested in supporting the industry and Vermont’s working landscape.

The Association works to offer our members benefits and education on industry research and updates, best practices, food safety regulations, product innovations, and more. In addition, we serve as the voice of Vermont maple and share information with consumers across the county and the world.

You can find recipes, news, and information on how to become a member at vermontmaple.org

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Georges Seurat, “Trees, Winter,” 1883

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s a college kid studying art in Chicago, I made a habit of passing through the city’s major museum almost every day. We all did – shuffling back and forth between classes and buildings with backpacks and portfolios slung across our chests; conversations, glib and animated and far too comfortable, bouncing off of paintings and tourists and hushed gallery walls. The museum was as much a part of our commute as the city’s trains and buses. This habit, which I’m sure predated the lot of us, horrified our professors. “It’s not a throughway,” one instructor, a pioneer in the field of architecture theory, bellowed from the sidewalk. “There’s a Seurat for chrissakes!” He yelled in italics. How many times, I wonder, had he voiced that refrain? Did he always choose the Seurat? By then it was too late: for yet another generation of art students, the museum had turned into a series of hallways and stairways to get from one destination to another.

Now, as a farmer in the Upper Valley, I think of March as another one of these gobetween places. Snow recedes only to advance again. Ruts deepen, then firm. The sky flits from glorious to sullen; temperatures, too. Fields, once resplendent in winter finery, begin to look like dirty socks. Neither winter nor spring, March is the shifty corridor connecting the two. That professor of mine, the one shouting from the foot of the Art Institute’s stairs, would describe such a passage in spatial terms like “transitional” or “liminal,” or, if he were really on a roll, “interstitial.”

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so demanding in warmer months, stand listless and contained in sheltered enclosures.

When I drop bales for the cows, I sometimes catch myself joining in their mournful middle-distance gaze, pondering if we – the cows and me – will ever see green again.

My boss tells me to take heart. Rest while I can. She is a veteran farmer and lifelong Vermonter. “It will start again soon,” she says as we thin tray after tray of broccolini.

“And then it will go, go, go,” she croons to a spindly Happy Rich.

Did I mention our farm is also a school? And March at the school happens to be the month when we break for two weeks of “spring.” I’m told this is an attempt to spare students the worst of mud season, to see them off before they’re stuck. (The horror!) So see them off we do, depositing them and their stuff on town pavement just in time for exotic vacations and south-bound trains. When the school van slaloms past a group of my colleagues schlepping groceries by foot, the kids are doubly horrified to learn we’ve all been walking to work. I try to sell the commute as a pleasure of mud season (this hallway is not without art!), but they don’t buy it. Really, I tell them, it’s almost like living in a city – the happy accident of slogging alongside neighbors, making small talk and dinner plans and trading gossip. The students nod. “Almost,” one of them says. A verbal pat on the back.

A few days later, I flee, too. I leave on the eve of a blizzard, rearranging flights and booking hotels, desperate to see some grass. (I’m surprised to discover how much I’m willing to pay to look at not-snow.) When I return a week later, said snow is mostly melted, roads mostly firm, Vermont mostly thawed. It feels, almost, like spring.

A writer friend of mine points out that the end of a hallway is still, unfortunately, a hallway. I suppose she’s right. But now I can’t stop thinking about my favorite shortcut through the museum, which had nothing to do with efficiency and more to do with an artwork called Untitled (Portrait of Ross in L.A.). The sculpture occupied a corner of a tucked-away gallery in the Modern Wing and was comprised of a pile of hard candies wrapped in technicolor cellophane. The candy was free, and you could take however many you wanted, which we did, until another distraught instructor, this one a pioneer of colored pencil portraiture, told us the candy was measured out each morning to match the healthy weight of the artist’s partner, who died of AIDS in the early 90s. Oh. After that, we only took one. Years later and Ross and his metaphors still rattle around in my brain.

On the next to last day in March, I load up the farm truck and drive north to retrieve our first batch of spring piglets. The only mud I encounter is a deep slip at the entrance of the pig farmer’s barn. We chat for a few minutes about her breeding ambitions, the two Large Black sows she imported from North Carolina, the fluky winter, the anticipation of a flukier spring. She shows me to a stall crowded with piglets, each about the size of a sourdough boule but with the giddy heft of a golden retriever. They move like a school of fish. Her husband joins us and the two of them hand off four gilts, shrieking and writhing. I drop them, one by one, into deep straw in the homemade crate strapped to the back of my truck. Have I ever been this happy?

I stop several times along 91 to check on the piglets (sleeping), the truck’s tires (fine), the crate (secure), the price of fuel (climbing). And, with each stop, I wonder when someone, anyone – the girl passing pastries at the Freighthouse, the attendant counting change for gas, the police officer idling on the highway verge – will ask what’s in my truck (never). Closer to town, I pass a neighbor, a woman I got to know on our muddy walks, driving in the opposite direction. She slows but doesn’t stop; waves but doesn’t seem to notice the haphazard crate. “Hey,” I want to call out to her, “I’ve got a Seurat here for chrissakes!” —Sidney Tilghman stor ie s f r om & f or t h e l an d

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Moderate mid-month conditions at the Richardson Farm Maple sugarhouse in Woodstock.

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March: Warm and Wet

he first half of March felt like April, and we appeared on track to have another extraordinarily warm month. The perennials in the garden seemed a month early. Some of the popples and red maples were in flower during the first week of March in southern Vermont, which is at least two weeks before you’d expect it. Because of the strong El Niño and the record-breaking 133

winter warmth, many people feared that we were heading for a month like the off-the-charts March we had in 2012, when temperatures shot up into the 80s for an extended stretch after Saint Patrick’s Day. Fortunately, temperatures moderated somewhat mid-month and, all told, the month came in about 6 degrees above the 20th century mean. v e r mon t al m anac | vol u m e v

It was our warmest March since 2012, but in the context of the weather we’ve had lately, 50 and 60s in March instead of 70s and 80s felt like a win.

It was a month notable for its moisture.

Precipitation totals in Montpelier and St. Johnsbury were both over 5 inches, around double the normal average. Rutland reported 6.29 inches of rain, and Bennington saw 6.35 inches. According to NOAA data, it was the third-wettest March in 128 years of record keeping.

Blessedly, there was some earnest snow in this precipitation. Areas of southern Vermont that were below 1,500 feet in elevation spent much of the winter with bare ground. Occasionally little clippers would come through, or the tail end of a rainstorm would turn to snow, and one or two inches would accumulate here and there. But there were no heavy snows… that is until a storm on the 23rd and 24th dumped over two feet in some places. Reports from Woodstock came in at 28 inches, Ludlow at 27.3 inches.

This storm occurred on Vermont’s Maple Open House weekend, which added an adventurous element to the event. Some forward-thinking sugarmakers canceled; certainly traffic was down, since the roads were largely undrivable for much of Saturday. News stories focused on the economic hardship this caused, because for many smaller sugarmakers this is a big sales event. But God things were beautiful. The storm blew out Saturday night and Sunday broke blue – this gorgeous empyrean light; snow clinging to everything. The rest of the day was cloudless and the world looked, finally, like mid-winter. People were joyful.

The central and southern parts of the state got the heaviest snow, as was the case with the epic March snowstorm we had in 2023. (Ludlow got 27 inches in that one, too.) Some of the larger ski areas were able to ramp back up and extend the season. Some of the smaller ski areas had already shut down for the year when the snow came, making it bitter-sweet.

JONAH JACOBUS

Rolling south from Bellows Falls on March 30, 2024, post-snow storm.

With this year’s 24-plus-inch snowstorm in mind, we looked back at our weather summaries from the past four volumes of Vermont Almanac and saw that in March 2023, Readsboro reported an absurd 42.1 inches of snow in a generational snowstorm. In March 2022, Morgan got 20 inches in a strong mid-month storm. This trendline breaks in March 2021, which was a low-snow month. In March 2020, a storm on the 23rd dumped close to a foot in some areas. stor ie s f r om & f or t h e l an d

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The Poor Man’s Daffodil

efore the spring beauties and the violets bloom; before the bloodroot; before the blackflies and the mosquitoes arrive along with the phoebes and other early songbirds that will devour them; before the maples flower – a modest token of the spring arrives to cheer, anticipate, and reassure.

Coltsfoot is a singlestemmed wildflower, usually under a foot tall. The flower

itself is about the size of a quarter. It’s made up of bracts surrounding a central array of petals. The color is a bright butter-yellow. With its yellow flower and green basal leaves, coltsfoot has a claim to be the poor man’s daffodil. Its unassuming nature goes with its habit of growth. It thrives where other early plants don’t venture. Look for coltsfoot in the bitter, sterile till of roadside gravel banks; look for it in the

We noticed the first coltsfoot blossom of 2024 on March 13.

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cracks of concrete parking lots and along driveways.

And look for it promptly.

After no more than about a week, the flowers of the coltsfoot will have reproduced and died back, and the leaves will have fallen away. An old folk name for the plant is “sonbefore-the-father,” because coltsfoot’s leafing out and its flowering seem to be reversed.

There is no more ephemeral plant species in the woods.

Coltsfoot’s scientific name is Tussilago farfara, from a Latin word for cough, an ailment that coltsfoot has been used to treat (perhaps by the same fanciful herbalists who found that the plant’s leaves resembled the hoof of a colt).

Coltsfoot is a member of the daisy family and is found over the northern parts of the US, but it’s not a native species, having been introduced long ago for its supposed medicinal value.

Though it’s not as common as the dandelion, which gets most of the press, the coltsfoot has its following, especially at a time of damp, fog, lingering snow, gray skies, and frigid mud, a season too often still belonging at least half to winter, a season in which we in the Vermont hill country are prepared to agree that most any flower will do.

—Castle Freeman, Jr. v e r mon t al m anac | vol u m e v

most of the moths you see in march

JIM RUSSELL

belong to the family Noctuidae; they’re also known as owl moths because their eyes shine brightly when light hits them.

Sugarmakers often find them dead, floating in sap buckets.

And so it was nice to see this one resting comfortably on some finished syrup.

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Mobile Salt-lick

he tongue marks on the side of Nancy Howe Russell and Jim Russell’s truck serve as a humorous confirmation of the white-tailed deer’s affinity for salt. Almost all soils more than 25 to 50 miles from the seacoast are low in sodium. In addition, in spring, many of the plants that white-tailed deer consume have a higher concentration of potassium and water, which interferes with efficient sodium conversion, leaving deer with an increased need for salt. Does that are pregnant are particularly salt-starved, as they need twice as much sodium as bucks at this time of year. —Mary Holland

many of us were taught that red foxes are not native to Vermont; it was thought that

they were introduced to New England from Europe for sport hunting in the 1700s. But today we know better. A recent analysis of animal remains from archeological sites throughout Vermont confirmed the presence of 3,000-year-old red fox bones at three sites. Genetic testing also indicates that our native red foxes successfully interbred with the introduced European foxes despite a million years of divergence. stor ie s f r om & f or t h e l an d

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Some Early Coins Found in Vermont Metal detecting is best done in early spring, after the snow disappears from the frost-heaved ground but before the earth greens up and becomes lush. This past spring we paid a visit to Henry Martinka, an avid metal detectorist, to see some of the treasures he’s collected over the years in southern Vermont. His table was full of colonial belt buckles, sleigh bells, candle snuffers, musket balls, keys, thimbles, buttons, silverware – we could have filled this whole book with stories about the objects. But for the sake of efficiency we focused on a handful of his favorite coins, which all have fascinating backstories.

1. These British pennies were known as “cartwheels” because of their huge size. On one side there’s a picture of King George III’s head; on the other side there’s a picture of the seated figure of Britannia – a helmeted female warrior carrying a trident and shield.

2. This is a Vermont copper coin, issued during the period when Vermont was an independent state (1777-1791) and minted by Reuben Harmon, Jr. of Rupert. The design is called the “baby head” by collectors because the figure on it looks like a child. The Bennington Museum has one that’s in excellent condition.

3. This “capped bust dime” was minted in 1835.

The female form Lady Liberty on the coin traces her roots back to the ancient Roman goddess Libertas, who carried a felt hat called a Phrygian cap that symbolized the emancipation of slaves.

The colonists co-opted this symbolism and imagery in their fight for emancipation from Britain and it featured prominently on their early currency.

4. The two holes in this coin indicate that someone turned it into a toy called a whizzer. A string was laced through the holes and tied at the ends to make a loop. The user then spun the coin until the string was wound up, then pulled briskly to make a whizzing sound. stor ie s f r om & f or t h e l an d

5. This is another Vermont copper coin. The inscription: Stella quarta decima is Latin for The Fourteenth Star. The motto expressed the state’s aspiration to join the United States, which eventually happened on March 4, 1791.

6. This 3-cent coin was an unusual denomination that appeared in the mid-1800s. They were known as trimes, and unofficially as “fish scales.” In 1851, stamps were 3 cents, so this coin made purchasing postage easier (and was cheaper than making three pennies).

7. This is a counterfeit King George II penny from 1750. You can tell it was sandcast and poured with a cheap alloy instead of copper. The idea that someone would counterfeit a penny made us think they must have been valuable in the mid-18th century – back then 12 pennies made a shilling, 20 shillings made a pound. But a British inflation calculator indicates they were only worth around £.60 in today’s money, which is about $1. So why would you go through all the trouble?

8. This fugio cent, also known as the Franklin cent, was the first official circulation coin in the United States. It’s said to have been designed by Ben Franklin. It features a picture of a sun and sundial on the front with the Latin inscription fugio – meaning “I flee/fly,” as in time flying by.

There’s also the inscription Mind Your Business.

You might be tempted to read this as a Libertarian mantra, but from everything we know about Franklin, he probably meant the word business literally. On the back of the coin is a chain with 13 rings, representing the colonies, and the inscription We Are One. 9. This is a two-reales Spanish coin. You can tell by the mint mark that it was made in Mexico City in 1772. Henry speculates that the hole in the coin was made so the owner could string coins together – breeches and pantaloons didn’t have pockets in them. Another theory suggests that silver coins were used as good luck charms.

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Beyond Maple

KRIS DULMER

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KRIS DULMER

s a person with a background in forest biology, I always found the process of making maple syrup fascinating. When I started making syrup myself, I was super excited to find out that more than maple trees could make that delicious treat. Running down the list of possible species to tap, I figured I could tap six different species of trees that were locally found.

I settled on sugar maple, Norway maple, butternut, black walnut, yellowwood, and ironwood.

After securing permission to tap trees across 12 different sites, I was ready to roll. For the larger quantities of sap produced from my maple sites, I used reversed osmosis to help concentrate the sap. And for the smaller quantities of sap obtained from the butternut, walnut, yellowwood, and ironwood, I just boiled the old fashioned way.

This all required running two evaporators side

by side. I am fortunate to have an understanding wife who tolerates countless buckets and pots cluttering our small home.

I could go on for days about what I learned from my experience collecting sap from these different trees. But I’ll keep it brief and give a short summary of each syrup produced. Sugar maple syrup is still king; the production is great and the flavor is always on point. The invasive Norway maple redeems its insidious nature by producing a wonderful maple syrup, in spite of the low sugar content. Butternut syrup is tricky because of the high levels of natural pectins (jelly) in its sap, but the honey-flavored syrup produced is fantastic. The walnut syrup had a complex flavor profile of caramelized sugars and earthy notes.

Most surprising was the yellowwood syrup, which had a strong cotton candy flavor. As far as I know, this was the first time yellowwood was tapped to make syrup. And lastly, the ironwood ran late in the season, like birch, and had a savory bitter taste that was not very pleasant. I can compare it to molasses mixed with a little balsamic vinegar.

Overall, every step of the process was full of learning and wonder. Although I don’t produce these syrups at my new home, I still cherish the quart jars of all the different syrups I have buried deep in my freezer. —Kris Dulmer v e r mon t al m anac | vol u m e v

Make Your Own Sugar The New York Times ran an exposé in March 2024 that detailed horrendous conditions in India’s sugarcane plantations.

The details change with the times, but the basic gist of this story is centuries old: sugarcane is a brutal crop to harvest, and the field workers who do it are often brutalized.

You could research global supply chains and try to find ethically sourced cane sugar. Or you could simply go down to a local sugarhouse this spring, buy some syrup, and make your own. It’s a super-simple process. First, dump a quart of syrup into a large pot – you want lots of headroom. (A quart of syrup will yield about 2 pounds of granulated sugar.)

Run a stick of butter around the rim of the pot – the smear should run around the top inch.

When syrup is brought to a rolling boil it tries to escape; the butter will keep it contained.

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Bring the temperature up to 260 and then start stirring.

It’s up to you to stir the last of the liquid out. Stir, stir, stir, and when your arm gets tired and you worry your candy thermometer is off, keep stirring. It’ll seem like you’re stirring magma, and then poof, it’ll turn into wet sand.

Keep stirring and eventually your bowl will be full of light, fluffy sugar.

At this point use a thin sieve to filter the sugar into varioussized particles. The finest particles will be almost powderlike. Most of it will be the consistency of a fine-grained cane. Some of it will be in bigger, crumble form – we save those for ice cream topping.

A pro tip: use light syrup.

The lighter syrup generally has lower invert sugar than the darker stuff, and so will give you a drier finished product and superior yield.

—Dave Mance III

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A Good Year For Many

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ermont’s 2024 crop of pure maple syrup was estimated by the USDA to be 3.108 million gallons. This is a jump of nearly 20 percent from the state’s 2023 crop, and perhaps more impressive given how volatile each season can be, a 10 percent increase compared to the fiveyear average. Vermont’s 2024 crop constituted half of all the syrup produced in the United States, and was produced by tapping an estimated 141,000 acres of sugarbush.

The 2024 maple season actually began in 2023, as Vermont’s largest operations began tapping in December. While defining large in terms of operation size is challenging, the USDA uses greater than 20,000 taps as the largest category when reporting production. According to the most recent Census of Agriculture, Vermont has 92 maple operations that exceed that threshold.

For context, there are only 157 operations in that category in the entire United States. While these

operations would perhaps prefer to delay tapping until closer to the onset of regular freeze-thaw cycles in spring, labor constraints, the unknowns around future snow conditions in the woods, and the sheer number of taps they need to install, combined with warm weather that appears to be arriving earlier each year, compel these producers to get an early start. Sap flow can occur throughout the winter if temperatures are above freezing, though it can take a surprisingly long time for big trees to thaw. Small trees will start running sooner, as will the outer rings of larger trees, but neither will produce significant runs compared to later in the season. But of course, when there’s sap, it needs to be boiled. While the largest producers have the manpower to do this throughout the winter, the majority of commercial producers still wait to begin tapping in January or February.

Overall, snow depths were manageable and reports of easy tapping conditions were common.

2024 maple syrup season - long production

% of anticipated crop at individual maple operations in select Vermont counties 140%

Orleans (about the same) Quebec (colder)

120%

Lamoille (colder) Windham (colder)

100%

Chittenden (about the same) Franklin (warmer)

80%

Addison (warmer) Lamoille (warmer) Windham (warmer)

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40% 20%

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MAR 9

MAR 19

MAR 29

APR 8

APR 18

Season-long production for select operations around Vermont.

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PROCTOR MAPLE RESEARCH CENTER

Surveys of maple producers suggest that just a little less than half of Vermont producers began their season by tapping “earlier” or “the earliest ever,” while the remainder began tapping at an average time. Research by the University of Vermont into the effects of early tapping have produced no consistent relationship between timing of tapping and yield. What is clear, though, is that the temperatures during the sap season are the number one determinant if a given season is deemed good or not. A day or two with high temperatures can have a significant effect. A specific temperature threshold has not yet been determined, perhaps because of all the variables in play (site, elevation, aspect). But it’s clear that high temperatures, and the microbial activity they engender, cause sap flow to diminish. And once flow from tap holes begins to slow down, there is little that can be done to reverse the effect. This was illustrated at some Vermont operations this season when an abnormally warm weather pattern settled in around the middle of March. (See Gray birch trees? No, this image, taken in 1962 at the accompanying graph.) If a given sugarbush tended Proctor Maple Research Center, shows xylem tissue to be warmer than others in the area, the high around a taphole. The larger, vertical channels are temperatures appear to have set those operations sap conducting cells, and the smaller, horizontally on a distinctly different trajectory than others arranged lines that intersect the vessels are ray cells, that were generally considered colder. Those who where photosynthates are stored. The dark blobs describe their operation as being colder saw good in the sap conducting cells indicate plugging – rates of sap flow when more seasonal temperatures this is caused by bacterial invasion of the taphole. returned, whereas those operations that reported having generally warmer woods saw production level off.

In terms of statewide production, it appears that a higher concentration of taps, and therefore production, are situated in cooler areas.

Syrup quality was reported to be good overall, and most seemed to be in the darker grades. Roughly half of surveyed producers reported that sap sweetness was average or above average, which left the other half of producers wondering what happened to their sugar. No clear pattern has emerged to explain the varying results, as many factors beyond temperature play a role in determining the County fairs provide an opportunity for maple producers to see sweetness of sap. — Mark Isselhardt how their syrup stacks up in terms of quality.

MARK ISSELHARDT

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Sugaring Changed in 2012

hile the concept of climate change was first introduced in 1938, and CO2 monitoring began in earnest in 1958, it wasn’t until the hot year of 1988 that many people began talking about climate change as a serious problem. Since then, both the discussion and the planet have been heating up relentlessly.

That’s the 30,000-foot timeline, anyway. For sugarmakers in Vermont, 2012 was the year that climate change became a phenomenon that was impossible to ignore. The weather in March broke that year in a way that no one had ever seen before. A five-day heat wave settled in just after St. Patrick’s Day, with temperatures flirting with 80 each day. NOAA’s National Climate Data Center reported that over 7,000 daily recordhigh temperatures were tied or broken across the northern part of the county. The heat killed the season, but something bigger changed, too. If

there was anyone still clinging to the old don’ttap-until-town-meeting-day rule in southern Vermont, they were forced to change their ways.

After that year, the timeworn ideas about when sugaring season occurs needed to be rethought.

Recently, I visited John Williamson, a friend and fellow sugarmaker in Shaftsbury, who has production records that bear this out. From 1968 to 1998, every sugaring season at the Williamson farm began in March. “We might have been more cautious with buckets back then,” he said.

Because tapholes dry out more quickly with buckets, they might have been more inclined to let a February warm spell pass without tapping.

But the consistency was remarkable, and most years were good seasons. 1998 and 2002 were the first two years that the Williamsons boiled in February, but after these blips, sugaring season fit neatly in March again.

The Williamsons kept their records on calendars, and though the timeline stretches back to 1968, there are a few holes. “Dad would occasionally use one to start the fire,” John said.

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Since the norm-shattering season of 2012, they’ve boiled in February in 10 of the last 12 years.

In the two years when they didn’t make February syrup (2014, 2015), most of the crop was made in April, which is off in the other direction. At our sugarhouse, we have good records that stretch back to the mid-1990s, and they mirror John’s. To be

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clear, we’ve all had good seasons since 2012, it’s just that the season has started earlier; the data reveal that sugaring season begins – pretty consistently – in February now in southern Vermont. And as recently as during the Obama administration, that wasn’t the case. It certainly makes you wonder what the next 12 years might bring. —Dave Mance III

How has the value of maple held up over time?

sold a drum of light syrup this spring to a packing house and was paid $2.30 a pound for it. And shortly thereafter, while doing some historical research for the Almanac, stumbled across this packing slip at the Vermont Historical Society, showing what a farmer was paid for his syrup in 1939. He got 11.5 cents per pound, which comes out to around $2.50 in today’s dollars. If you’re a glass-half-full person, you think, well, the price has held up pretty well over the last 85 years. And if you’re a glass-half-empty person, you think: “so the bulk price is .20 a gallon less today than it was during the Great Depression?”

It made me wonder about some of the other commodity prices for crops we write about in the Almanac, so I tracked down a digital copy of the USDA’s 599-page compendium of agricultural statistics from that year and started ctrl-F-ing.

If I’d given way to despair on the syrup prices and turned the sugarbush into logs, I’d have gotten around $625 per thousand board feet this spring for #1 hard maple sawlogs. In 1939, average stor ie s f r om & f or t h e l an d

maple logs were going for $21.70 per thousand, or $487.60 in inflation-adjusted terms.

The average price that a farmer received for a hundredweight of milk in Vermont in March 2024 was $22.80 (organic milk was $36.59); the average price in 1939 in inflationadjusted dollars was $39.32 per hundredweight.

Thinking of the story about organic tomato-grower Dave Chapman that’s in the June chapter of this volume, I looked at modern stats for greenhouse tomatoes to compare. This was hard to do, since Vermont is not a commodity tomato state and there are big regional and seasonal discrepancies in price, but a

shoot-from-the-hip comparison shows that green-house tomato prices have nearly tripled in 85 years, going from an inflationadjusted $23.82 per 53-pound bushel in 1939 to somewhere around $60 for the same weight in March 2024. This food’s evolution, from something that was commonly stewed, crushed, and canned to something that’s sliced and served fresh pretty much everywhere, is on display in those statistics.

Beef prices have done well, too. In 1939 the price of commodity beef was $1.57 a pound in inflation-adjusted dollars. Vermont farmers today are averaging $3.63 a pound.

—Dave Mance III

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Surviving Sugaring Season

parenting in the midst of chaos on the family farm .

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team billowed out of the top of our evaporator as the sweet sap snaked its way through the pans, slowly boiling down into deliciously sticky maple syrup. Because of how efficient our new arch was, we couldn’t feel even a lick of heat, and icicles hung from the edge of the firebox as a 2,000-degree storm of flames raged inside. What I did feel around me was chaos. I clenched my eyes tight to stop the tears from flowing and forced myself to take a deep breath, but still I could feel the immense anxiety building inside my chest, ready to burst.

My 1-year-old was standing at my feet, arms outstretched, tears dripping off his chin, his red face screaming for me to pick him up. I had been holding him for hours already. At the same time, our 3-year-old had fallen in a puddle and was crying because he was shivering cold. Ian had gone to grab a load of sap while they were napping, and they’d both woken up while he was gone. Because of all the layers we had on – snowsuits, jackets, big boots for little feet – our youngest wouldn’t fit in my go-to carrier, and I was tired on all levels. Emotionally, physically, mentally. There is nothing that rips at a mother’s soul like their children screaming.

Six months earlier, our neighbors had come to us with a proposition: they wanted to know if we were interested in taking over their sugarbush and leasing their trees. We said yes, a decision that more than doubled the size of our sugaring operation, Ackermann Maple Farm, from 8,500 to over 18,000 taps. In the present moment, though, with two screaming children looking at me, I cursed myself for having wanted to expand.

Why did I think this was a good idea? Sure, it would help us pay off the loans we took out to start our business faster, but I was starting to think I’d be willing to live in a cardboard box for the rest of my life in order to not have to be doing this right now. It was the middle of the Covid quarantine.

We had no help with our young boys. I had gone from being a mom who was really involved with 145

her kids to a mom whose main focus now was not burning up our new wood-fired evaporator. Our normal family routine was non-existent.

I’d like to say that Ian and I were patient and calm in those times when it felt like everything was falling apart, but we were not, and between equipment failures, sap overflowing onto the ground because we couldn’t boil it fast enough, and lack of sleep, we were having meltdowns of our own. It was not a stable two months for our family, and when we finally pulled the plug after the sap turned to rancid jelly in the tanks, announcing the end of the season, I let out a deep sigh of relief. We survived. In the end, Mother Nature rewarded us with a recordbreaker of a season, giving us over half-a-million gallons of sap to be boiled down to 9,800 gallons of liquid gold.

Fast forward three years to the spring of 2024.

The boys, now 4 and 6, are sleeping soundly in a little tent with cartoon animals on it, perched on a tower of hot barrels full of fresh maple syrup.

I still shudder at the thought of that expansion year. It’s made me extremely hesitant to take on any similar ventures we may come across, because the juggle was too much. We wouldn’t have made it through without the support from our community: our daycare providers, our nighttime babysitters, the friends and family who fed and kept us company during the late nights.

The kids have slowly morphed into capable young children who go about their business in the world. Part of me is sad that their babyness is over, part of me is relieved. It’s still not easy, but now they can understand when we explain to them why we do all of this. When there are moments during sugaring that are tough, we remind them that it’s only for a short period of time. We tell them that in order for us to go on lots of adventures during the summer, we have to work really hard for a bit right now. We give them little journals so that when they’re feeling sad and frustrated they can draw pictures of all v e r mon t al m anac | vol u m e v

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Calm after the storm: a family photo at the end of the 2024 sugaring season. of the fun things we’ll do once the sap has dried up, the leaves have come out on the trees, and the warm weather is here again.

What is left unsaid is that this life we’ve built for ourselves over the past decade, with all of the compromises and sacrifices we’ve made, and stor ie s f r om & f or t h e l an d

hardships and obstacles we’ve overcome, is still worth it. We’re building all of this for them. So that someday their office can be the woods, their commute can be walking down the driveway to the sugar shack, and their livelihood can be made from collecting sugar from trees. —Caitlin Ackermann

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Are you a landowner, maple producer, farmer, or natural resource professional interested in supporting birds and overall biodiversity on the land?

Audubon’s Working Lands programs are for you!

• Healthy Forests • Bird-Friendly Maple • Forester Training & Endorsement • Bird & Bee Friendly Farming A state program of the National Audubon Society, Audubon Vermont works to protect birds and the places they need, today and tomorrow.

802-434-3068

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vermont@audubon.org

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Spare Time Three flies patter away the afternoon, logy with warm sun, inside gossip and bookclub insight.

On a south-facing window frame they ruminate upon the ancient wisdom and decry the lack today.

They pause at times to smooth wings and gaze with goggle-eyed disinterest

at the last of the snowplow mounds outside.

Soon enough – they know – they’ll ply

fresh air again, crazy-busy with the business of spring.

No time for tittle-tattle then: up early, breakfasted and buzzing before dew dries on the dog turd

in the grass out back.

To-do lists at the ready.

And yes, between chores – leisure season tabled they’ll muse fondly

upon these unemployed days, tinkering poems

with the first inklings of spring, when early to bed held sway.

late to rise

—David Holzapfel

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“Maya’s Pond” on Music Mountain Road in Stockbridge, in stained glass, by Karen Deets.

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pril opened with a notable snowstorm on the fourth and fifth – between one and two feet fell on much of the state. And when the month was over and the data were tabulated, things ended up modestly above average from both a temperature and precipitation standpoint.

But we’re going to gloss right over all those details and get right to April 8, when on a clear afternoon the sun completely disappeared in the northern half of Vermont.

People in the media had been talking about the solar eclipse for months. And when something is overhyped like that, it’s almost certain to disappoint. After a cloudy winter, and in a month specifically known for its showers, the weather itself also seemed primed to disappoint. Statistically speaking, there was a 70 to 80 percent chance that the afternoon of April 8 would be cloudy and no one would see anything. But dawn broke clear and bright – the day was gorgeous – and while some wispy cirrus clouds pushed in from the south just before the big show, they didn’t do anything to detract from the experience.

The path of totality – the area where the sun would appear completely obscured – was 120 miles wide and on a diagonal: if you put a ruler on a map and connected Middlebury, Barre, and Peacham and drew a line through the state, that was pretty much the southern boundary. If you were south of that line during the eclipse, the shadows got weird, and you could look through glasses and see the moon blotting out most of the sun. It was a cool event. But those who were north of that line saw something unforgettable.

Until you see a total eclipse, you can’t really grasp the order of difference between 95 percent and 100 percent totality. The sun is so strong that even a tiny asymmetry in the alignment makes it too bright to look at with your eyes. But when the moon fully blots out the sun, and darkness falls 153

like a curtain, and the matte light looks metallic and impossibly wrong because it’s night and day at the same time, and you can stare directly at the sun without eye protection and it looks like a hieroglyph on a temple, you understand how in ancient times people were so freaked out that they conducted sacrifices in the wake of these events.

You understand stories of people weeping. You understand why there’s a subculture out there chasing total eclipses, flying all over the world for a visual that might last two or three minutes.

Virginia was in Glover for the event, and she remembers: “The eclipse was so unlike anything I’d ever known that there are no words for it. I suppose it could be called overwhelming or marvelous, but those words normally belong to lesser experiences. Humbling and exalting at the same time? No, nothing works. Two planets were clear as night and a glow, like dawn or dusk light, lit the horizon for its entire circumference. Now, five months later, I can still summon an echo of the sensation, the sensation for which even the word awe isn’t quite enough.”

Patrick was in Middlesex, and notes that while the National Weather Service in Burlington recorded swings of 5 to 10 degrees at weather stations around Northern New England, “the change in temps felt even more dramatic than the numbers showed. We all reached for our coats.

Beyond that, I remember the fascinating reaction of my dog. A hyperactive golden retriever, he stood stone still for three minutes (quite possibly the longest he has ever been still); he didn’t sit, look up, look at us, or bark – just stood motionless, staring straight ahead.”

Brett was in Hardwick with her daughter and neighbors, sitting on wooden kitchen chairs, drinking coffee, exchanging gossip. “We wondered how weird this thing was going to get,” she remembers. “Then the sky bloomed molten gold v e r mon t al m anac | vol u m e v

DAVE MANCE III DAVE MANCE III

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and Caribbean blue. I leaped on my chair, screaming, ‘Yes!’ The neighbor’s little boy chanted ‘Wow, wow, wow.’ We were wrapped in awe. Going forward, even on the most dismal and disheartening of rainy January afternoons – and don’t we all hit these? – I’ll remember sodden gray is merely one hue, that my human eyes see a partial world, and the bones of this universe hum with a righteous joy.”

It feels impossible to overstate how magnificent it was. Oh, I hope you saw it, because for most of us, that phrase “once-in-a-lifetime event” will apply. Those in southern Vermont who just missed out on totality will get a chance to see a full eclipse just after sunrise on May 1, 2079.

Those in northern Vermont can expect a repeat performance around noon on August 2, 2399.

We looked back at our weather summaries from the past four volumes of the Vermont Almanac and saw that April 2023 was the warmest April on record in many parts of Vermont; April 2022 was a “normal” month; April 2021 was abnormally warm and dry; April 2020 was a rare-these-days cooler than average month. stor ie s f r om & f or t h e l an d

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Zombie Moths

JANNI JACOBS

here is a group of fungi in the genus Cordyceps that is capable of manipulating the behavior of insects that they invade.

There are well over 100 known related species (Ophiocordyceps spp.) that infect a wide variety of insects, including butterflies, moths, and beetles, and at least 35 that perform “mind control” on their hosts. Fortunately, humans appear to be immune from these fungi’s powers.

One Cordyceps fungus replaces a moth’s tissues (see photo) and controls the moth’s endof-life movements in an attempt to increase the likelihood that its spores are dispersed to new hosts. The spikes you see on the pictured moth are a result of the fungus’s invasion of the moth.

—Mary Holland

CRAIG HUNT

there ’ s nothing quite as helpless - looking as a newly born bird. Nests containing young

ravens have been reported as early as April 29 in Vermont, according to the Vermont Atlas of Life.

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Winter Burn

vergreen plants retain their foliage year-round, which allows them to photosynthesize for a longer period than deciduous plants can. A trade-off is that the foliage is more susceptible to damage because of the harsh conditions of winter.

“Winter burn” is the general term for the damage to softwood needles that you frequently see in winter, and is often caused by desiccation. This can be the result of a lack of water because of shallow roots and/or frozen ground. It’s often prompted by a sudden drop in temperature after a warm day when the needles are biologically active. Winter burn typically manifests itself as orange or red needles, though this sort of discoloration on softwood trees along highways is more likely caused by spray from road salt, which produces a different type of winter burn. —Mike White

VIRGINIA BARLOW

a pileated woodpecker UNH EXTENSION

was at work on this project all winter. Every new snowfall was soon covered with a new layer of chips.

the snow in early april created perfect

conditions for seeing springtails, aka snowfleas. These tiny creatures are not actually fleas and don’t bite. They’re technically not even insects – they belong to a scientific class all of their own called Collembola. Watch them closely and you’ll understand the name springtail: when startled, they can hop up to 300 body lengths away. stor ie s f r om & f or t h e l an d

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S

pring on a farm often brings a flurry of activity that may not match an individual’s physical preparedness. Consider past injuries as you get to work, and ramp up slowly to prevent injuries.

For many, neck and back

Spring: Ramping Up pain at the season’s beginning is common if your “farming fitness” waned over the winter.

Many farm tasks, like seeding in a greenhouse, require a downward gaze. “Text neck” is a medical term for musculoskeletal complaints associated with extended or

repetitive periods in a flexed neck position (think chin to chest, like using a smartphone).

Your head weighs 10 to 12 pounds. That weight rests on your spinal column when you stand upright, with your postural muscles and feet assisting in maintaining posture and balance. Bending your head out of alignment increases the need to resist gravity load on the spine.

Studies show that when your neck is flexed to 60 degrees, gravity exerts a force equivalent to 60 pounds, with your neck and back muscles working hard to counter this load. movement variations and strategies

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Adjusting your working height can help decrease neck and shoulder strain.

• adjust the height or elevation of your greenhouse table, so the working height is between your armpits and belly button. This will decrease neck and shoulder rolling.

• standing spread eagle makes you shorter to the work; adding in a squat decreases your height further; sitting on a stool can also allow you to achieve optimal working height.

• frequently take stretching breaks or vary your tasks.

—Cynthia Flores

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Build A Solar Compass

hen it comes time to lay out a garden plot, or to decide the alignment of a new structure on our homestead, we want to know the four cardinal directions – exactly – to get every last bit of sun exposure. To do this we use a “solar compass,” a simple tool that requires just a handful of sticks and some basic knowledge of our place on this good Earth.

Vermonters live in the northern hemisphere, so the sun is always somewhat in the south, and our shadows are always somewhat in the north.

The sun always rises in the southeast and sets in the southwest. Ergo, our shadows travel in a predictable path each day, in a slight arc from the northwest to the northeast.

A solar compass can tell you the four cardinal directions by tracking the northwest-to-northeast movement of a shadow across a day, giving a true west-east line. From there it’s simple to plot out a perpendicular north-south access line that will give you the precise location of the cardinal directions. Here’s how to do it:

West-east line.

step 1 : Determine the true “solar noon” at your

location – the time when the sun is highest in the sky. For us in Strafford, we’re about 5 minutes off of the center of the time zone, meaning solar noon is at 11:55 during standard time and at 12:55 during daylight savings time. You can calculate this time for your town at susdesign.com/sunangle step 2 : On a sunny day, set a stake (about 2 feet

long) in the ground. Then exactly two hours before solar noon, set a small stake in the ground where the shadow of the large stake lands. Wait exactly the same amount of time after solar noon and then mark that spot. When you connect the 10 a.m. mark and the 2 p.m. mark, you’ve established your true west-east line. (See photo) step 3 : Using a carpenter’s square to get a 90

degree angle, you can now add an additional north-south line using two additional stakes. You have now drawn a perfect compass that you can use for your construction. (See photo) stor ie s f r om & f or t h e l an d

A perfect compass.

Note: You can get a rough west-east line in about a half hour by setting the small sticks in the ground at the shadow of the larger stick every 15 minutes.

This can be useful if you need a rough estimate in a hurry. However, the line will be slightly off, as the shadow line runs a slight arc that’s farther south in the early morning and late evening and farther north at noon. —Mark Kutolowski

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In Praise of Little Free Libraries

n the dark spring of 2020, when the first Covid lockdown began, my husband John and I hunkered down in our Dorset house.

Our local bookstore – a lifeline for us – was shuttered, as were our libraries. As an avid reader, and a writer who uses libraries for research, this added to Covid’s torture. In those long days, I remembered my teaching days at Hamline University in Minnesota, 10 years earlier. Before classes began, my colleagues and I explored St. Paul’s quiet streets.

We admired backyard gardens and perused the contents of many Little Free Libraries, anchored in the wide, grassy boulevards that run between that city’s sidewalks and streets. Those libraries, filled with books donated by residents and visitors, offered free reading adventures to anyone passing by. They boasted different colors and architectural styles. Most held adult books, with an occasional children’s title tucked in.

Our Dorset road has always been popular for walking.

During lockdown, more people than usual strode by, masked and keeping a safe distance. If we installed a library, would people come?

Would they contribute books?

We decided to find out.

Little Free Library’s website – littlefreelibrary.org – boasts small wooden libraries in a range of colors and 159

architectural styles. Choosing was like house hunting, with too many choices. Did we want a flat, peaked, or curved roof ?

Did we want a library shaped like a barn, or an old-fashioned schoolhouse with a bell? (No. Too cutesy.) We read the rules, picked out a simple, natural wood library with a shed roof, and placed the order.

While we waited for the library building to arrive, we looked for the best location – hopefully a spot where we could drive in a fencepost (not so easy in Vermont).

We wanted our library close enough to the house so that we could easily curate it, but far enough from our windows so people could browse privately.

We picked a spot near the far end of our fence, where a car could easily pull over, leaving room for the school bus or a big truck to pass.

To our delight, the library arrived in a few weeks.

We admired its design and appreciated the clear instructions about how to assemble the little building.

John warmed his shop and attached the library to its post, and a neighbor helped with the digging. Once the library was set in the ground, anchored with stones to keep it straight, it was time to fill the shelf.

We had our own stack of books to give away, but would our literary tastes appeal to a variety of readers? I emailed neighbors, letting them know

that the library was open for business – and asked for donations. Within a few days, the fun began. Glancing out our windows, we watched walkers stop to peruse the collection.

Neighbors came first, then folks from the other side of town: our electrician and his wife one day, retired school teachers another.

Cars with both Vermont and out-of-state plates pulled over.

People added books, then pulled others out, skimming through pages as if browsing in a bookstore or a traditional library. When two or three readers stopped, we wished we could eavesdrop on the lively conversations that people seemed to be having about the books.

Soon spy novels and mysteries (very popular) were tucked in next to literary novels. An occasional memoir, biography, or history book might appear beside a children’s fantasy novel.

Curating the collection was fun. I kept an eye on books that didn’t move. If they sat for too long, I donated them to a local book sale. A few well-read neighbors also helped with circulation. I wasn’t surprised when somewhat trashy books didn’t move, but others surprised me. The Boys in the Boat, a non-fiction favorite of ours, sat for months, as did an interesting memoir by Susan Cheever, a writer like her famous father, John.

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holiday lights along the fence that separates our yard from the road. This past year, John included the library in our decorations, wrapping an extra string of lights around the post and over its roof. The glowing lights made it easier for drivers to spot the library on dark December afternoons.

The day after Christmas, I sat at our kitchen table when a luxurious, low-slung sedan drove by. It stopped near our driveway, and I stood up; we weren’t expecting visitors. But the car reversed and backed down the road to the library, parking near our fence. Driver and passenger, dressed in heavy winter coats with faux fur collars, climbed out and peered into the library. I couldn’t see which books they took, but they were smiling as they drove away.

It’s now four years since we put up our library. Even though traditional libraries are once again open and busy, ours remains very active. We’re happy that walkers, drivers, and neighbors are still donating books and taking others away.

Perhaps it’s the spontaneity and the tease of what we might find that attracts us all?

I’ve recently finished Martin Walker’s latest Bruno mystery. We both enjoyed the descriptions of the French countryside, and Bruno’s gourmet dinners, as much as the story. Now it’s time to share the book with others. As I walk along the road, I wonder: has someone left Ross Gay’s second Book of Delights? Will

I find a tattered Elizabeth Bowen novel that I’ve never read? (Doubtful.) Is it possible someone has shared the latest Louise Penny mystery?

Who knows what small gem I will find when I twist the wire latch, open the door, and peruse the titles on those colorful spines. —Liza Ketchum

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“Eclipse Box” fiction

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ax’s mother was raking leaves beside the front door, scraping the tines around the green crocuses, when he slumped off the school bus. The grownups had been fighting for months, and the early dismissal day for the eclipse promised not much fun.

His mother wore his father’s coat, Blue Light Gas scripted in red, right cuff ripped, exposing her pale wrist. Dirt smeared her cheek. She said, “Go stay with your sister at the Darling place.”

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He held his school project under one arm, the eclipse viewer made from a Lucky Charms box.

“I’m hungry.”

“I haven’t gone shopping. Scavenge something in the Darlings’ kitchen.”

“Moms aren’t supposed to starve their kids.”

He opened the front door and chucked his backpack inside the mudroom.

“Don’t act that way.”

He pulled his bike from under the lilac bush.

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The bush’s branches had snapped jagged in the last ice storm. “What do you care? You’re selling our house anyway.”

“Max, please, please. Betty’s coming any minute.

I don’t have extra energy for this.”

Max, who was seven, spun away on his bike. He had ridden his bike all winter through showering snow, skittering over ice, pedaling in his clunky boots. At the road, finally ice-free, he peeked backwards in the hole between his armpit and the eclipse box. In her jeans with the dirty knees, his mom held the rake like a queen’s scepter, or maybe just a plastic rake with missing tines. Her mouth a muttering maw surrounded by dirt. c Max’s family lived in the squat house everyone still called The Milkhouse. A photograph hung on the kitchen wall showing the buttercup-yellow barn that had towered over the milkhouse back when cows lowed in the first floor, the upper floor crammed with hay. Like a fancy cake, the barn had two layers of roofs. Exactly why the barn burned, no one seemed to remember.

Their road was Church Brook Lane, now deadended at their driveway. In last July’s flood, the bridge over the brook snapped in half. Before, no one had really thought much about the brook.

Summers, yellow compass flowers taller than Max’s head waved on the bank.

The flood had covered the farm fields with water. The next morning, they’d all splashed in mud boots, the waters diminishing. Boulders and stones buried the rows of his mother’s echinacea, snapdragons, rudbeckia, the square of dahlias the family had planted that spring, the tall bee balm his mother denounced as common and Max loved most. Across the road, the Darlings’ house gleamed in the rising sun, red brick, green roof, the fairytale forest of shag-barked trees. Max’s mom clenched her arms over her chest, squeezing her elbows. Who would have guessed, she said, that slight elevation would save the neighbors?

While her farm – Judy’s Jewels – drowned?

A rushing river surrounded Max’s clump of cedars in the backyard. The soccer ball he stored in the tangled roots was surely lost. stor ie s f r om & f or t h e l an d

Suzy had consoled her, “Mom, our house is okay. Only damp.”

In the boulders and mud were crumpled Coke bottles, torn flipflops, a toilet seat. Their mother jammed her fists in her overall pockets. c Max stood on the pedals, pumping, his bike leaning left, right, left, one bare hand on the grips cold, the other clutching the pink Lucky Charms box. April, this far north, cold drifted up from the mud. The road’s ruts cut so deep Max’s cat Wendell hunkered there, hunting rust-bellied robins pecking at the tufted roadside weeds.

At the Darlings’ mailbox, Max grabbed envelopes and pushed his bike up the driveway. He propped his bike against the garage. Across the road, Betty Boucher’s SUV turned into his driveway, so polished black she could be the FBI. She stepped out, her arms cradling a binder, and stared at the maple beside the house, the faded shreds of Max’s box kite snagged in the tiptop branches. He shouted, “Go away!” His words scattered in the wind like garbage gum wrappers.

His mom swung open their front door. Betty disappeared inside.

In the Darlings’ kitchen, Max’s older sister Suzy folded laundry at the table. “Keep it down, kid. Old lady naptime.” She added a pillowcase to a tidy pile. “What’s that?”

“Eclipse box. For seeing.”

“You won’t need it. I got glasses for you.”

“Whatever.” With his finger, he blocked the pinhole where the light was supposed to stream in. He guessed the light would transform the box’s inside into a magical realm, like the peeka-boo Easter eggs in Howes’ Sweet Shoppe glass case. Through the holes were tiny pastel worlds of rabbit burrows, nesting ducks, pearly castles surrounded by emerald fields.

In the living room, the television hummed low.

Mrs. Darling was so rich Max didn’t know why she didn’t trash this dinky TV and get something real.

In the black purse she stashed under that stuffed chair, she kept a box of Alpine Mints. Sometimes, she offered the chocolates to Max – one or two, sometimes six or seven, like playing cards. He slid

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the sweets in his pocket. Later, when he ate the candies, melted, the green and brown had swirled together.

He jerked his chin at the tall cabinet beside the fridge.

“Make it fast before the blond-in-a-box daughter shows up again.”

He opened the dishwasher and took out the unwashed bowl sprinkled with forget-me-nots.

He took the Apple Jacks box from the cabinet and shook it into the bowl. Three pink cereal disks rattled on the bowl’s sticky bottom.

“Don’t open the new box. They’ll know.”

Max set the empty box back in the cabinet.

Standing, he held the bowl to his face and licked up the few pieces, the powdery crumbles. Over the bowl’s rim, he said, “That realtor Betty is at our house again.”

Suzy crammed folded dishcloths into a drawer. “I hate that woman.” She lifted the glass coffee pot from its burner and held it up, swirling the sludgy brew, considering, then dumped the slosh in a mug that read World’s Best Kept Secret.

She flipped through the mail, folded one sealed envelope, and zipped it in the pocket of her jacket that hung on a chairback.

“What’s that?”

“Nothing.”

He returned the sticky bowl to the dishwasher.

“A credit card offer?”

“Be a good boy. Go bike.”

He sunk in the whicker rocking chair. “Too muddy. You think Mom’s going to sell our house?”

“What do I look like? A fortune teller? Go be a kid. Suzy leaned against the wall where she could see through the front room’s picture window to the road, the World’s Best Kept Secret cupped in her hands.

“You’re a kid, too. Why am I supposed to go make a mud castle?”

“Are you actually whining at me?”

He snapped off a piece of white-painted straw from the chair arm. “The flood didn’t just pick on us. Other people aren’t selling their houses, their kids’ forts.”

“We’re river people, kid. Get used to it.”

“Church Brook. It’s just a brook.”

“Wrong.”

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c What Max loved about the old lady’s house was the stuff. The Darling farmhouse and hay barn and milkhouse and 300 acres of land were once the Noyes’ farm. Buildings and land were divvied up by people now dead, maybe buried in one of Goldbrook’s town cemeteries.

The Darling kitchen cupboards were a treasure trove of Rice-a-Roni boxes, oils and hot sauces, recipe books, jars of buttons and rusted nails, half-used seed packets rubber-banded together, pocket notebooks, balls of yarn and felted cat toys and electricians’ catalogs for wall lights, a stuffed unicorn with a rainbow horn.

Suzy grabbed a package from a cabinet and stacked shortbread cookies on the table beside Max’s box.

“I thought we weren’t supposed to be eating their stuff anymore.” But Max propped his chin on the table and ate like a dog.

“Gross, kid.”

His teacher, Mr. Swanson, had been talking up the eclipse since Christmas. The thing was sure to be a bust. All last week, they worked on their boxes.

On the bottoms’ insides, they glued white paper.

Mr. Swanson poked tiny holes in the tops, as if no one in third grade ever jabbed anything with a pushpin. But the boxes were actually pretty cool.

On the outside of her box, Gretta taped golden retriever puppies she had cut from a magazine.

Xavier glue-sticked dirt bikes. Marcy and Juniper crayoned a strawberry-red hot air balloon above Swanson’s Shredded Wheat.

Max didn’t cover his box. Inside, he drew his house and his own bed with the three corner posts shaped like acorns; he had never had the fourth.

Behind it rose the barn with the wedding cake roof as if it had never burned. He added his mom wearing her floppy hat and blue overalls, her garden of rainbow dahlias. He added the rocks the flood had given them. The pickup with its complaining transmission and the three-story bank in St. Johnsbury with the American flag waving on its front yard, and Suzy walking down the road, hands in her back pockets. Suzy always had a plan.

Should he put Dada in the pickup?

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him to put the box away, go on now, and get out his writing journal. The box’s end tore when he yanked his hand out. Mr. Swanson crabbed about listening and respect. Max ripped off the box’s top. He jammed the ruined thing in the trash can.

Later, during snack, when the lights were off, and they were supposed to be chilling and watching some video about the eclipse, Mr. Swanson salvaged Max’s box from the trash and pressed out the dents. Max was so mad he didn’t look at Mr. Swanson, just watched his hand with those long fingers, his nails with white crescents. As the video man droned on about totality, Mr. Swanson taped the box’s end. He set the box on Max’s desk. c Max lifted a nut shard from the table with his tongue. “Get rid of that. She’s here!” He jammed the half-eaten cookie in his hip pocket. Suzy brushed crumbs from the table, then clapped her hands together in the corner.

Jenn banged in, weirdly tall, dressed in silver sequin pants that looked as if they might fall apart. She carried a checkbook. “You’re drinking out of my mug. Wash it out. Put it back.”

Suzy held out the cup. “What is the world’s best kept secret, anyway?”

“Max,” Jenn said, “you need to go home now.”

“Your mother said he could stay. He always stays here after school.”

“I didn’t say he could.”

“Your mom did. That was the deal with me working here.”

Jenn squeezed the checkbook. “You want him to hear what I’m going to say? You and I, Missy, we need to talk.”

“Hold on a minute here. It’s almost eclipse time.”

“You’re not worming out of this. You stole from my mother.”

“No –” “There was cash, ones and fives, I don’t know how much, in that drawer, the one under the toaster. My mother always kept cash there.”

“No. No and no.” Suzy clattered the mug on the table.

Max twisted his ankles together. “I did it.” stor ie s f r om & f or t h e l an d

“You?” Jenn scoffed.

“I needed it for Christmas.”

“Get a load of that. Christmas? It’s April.

That’s the best you can do, kid?” She banged the checkbook on the table and then snatched it up again. “You’re all thieves and liars. Get out. You’re fired. I don’t like you anyway, the way you make yourselves too much at home here. Like you live here. Out.” “I don’t work for you. Me and my mom work for your mother –” “Oh, get out.” Jenn waved the checkbook. “You see this? I have it.”

“Fine! Max!” Suzy grabbed Max’s wrist and hustled him through the front room, straight for the door.

The old lady swiveled her head, gargled, “What?”

Suzy in her skinny jeans with mud splattered up her shins dragged Max across the sopping yard, his feet running.

Jenn leaned out the open doorway. “I’m not paying you for today, either!”

Suzy shouted, “Wasn’t asking you!”

The gooey mud slopped over Max’s shoes and soaked his feet. Behind them, cookie crumbs sprinkled from his pocket, sank into the mud, and disappeared. c Max twisted his arm. “My bike! My box!”

Suzy hustled him.

A strange smokiness fell down. “What is it?”

“Eclipse, Max. It’s starting.” c Someone, Max’s mother or Betty or both of them, had set out the folding metal chairs that were stacked in the mudroom against Dada’s summer truck tires. Max hunched on a chilly chair beside his mother. His mother’s hands rose and dipped, as if she were winding a skein of yard that only she could see. “Church Brook completely changed into a river. How was I supposed to know that would happen? Suze, Max, don’t look at the sun.”

Suzy went in the house and returned with

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paper eclipse glasses. She handed a pair to Max. Betty spread one hand over the binder and capped pen in her lap. “Moving on, it’s the best plan, the only course forward. Believe me, I’ve seen this before, Rita. Trust me.”

His mother’s hands twirled, that zigzag scar over her middle knuckle from the woodstove burn, so white it was colorless. (But what had Swanson said? That white held all the colors, mixed up?) “I was going to be okay. I had a CSA filled up, some accounts. This year looked decent.”

Blackbirds whistled in the clump of cedars that sprouted like a weird bouquet of flowers in the wet spot behind the house. Dada figured that scooping out the barn’s burnt skeleton had created this low place the cedars loved. They thrived wildly here. Max had rolled two firewood stumps there for chairs. He had tucked Dada’s pocketknife with the broken corkscrew under a raised root, wedged in a plastic bowl they used for wild blackberries. A raccoon had gnawed the bowl’s edge.

Betty rubbed her binder. “We’re supposed to see the stars, like a real night.”

Suzy put her paper glasses on and off. “The light is all wrong. Flat. Like an old-timey photograph.

Look, Betty. Your car isn’t red anymore. The color’s stripped out.”

A breeze scurried, sweeping along dead leaves, knotted twine, a paper coffee cup.

The paper around Max’s dark lenses was printed with swirls of purple and orange. The eclipse thing was happening, no stopping the motion of the universe, the moon erasing the sun, the sun licking furiously around the dark moon.

His mom rattled, “What do you think? The price of land’s high now, after the pandemic.”

“Rita, put on your glasses. Watch what’s happening. We’ll talk later.”

“Ballpark is all I need. A guess.”

The sun was the thinnest crescent of fire, not smooth like a wedding ring but slightly bumpy, uneven, warty. Max slid off his glasses. The cedars’ shadow sharpened, as if shadows could stand up from the earth and walk around, a whole creature unto itself. The afternoon hadn’t gone down to twilight. This was not at all what Max had thought would happen. Max was supposed to hold the box up to the sun and the moon, fill that vessel with 165

this strange mysteriousness. But his sister hadn’t let him go back for it.

In a bang, there was darkness but not night.

His mom jumped up on her chair. “The river!

The mountains!” Radiant gold and blue circled around them, no sunrise, no sunset – no east, no west, no north or south – simply pure light, flawless yellow, the moon gleaming like a coal on fire, the great smoky angel wings around the sun a quivering halo. The beast of the river undulated, pearly. Jupiter beamed. There were no minutes, no me, mine, theirs. Only the great world, transcendent. The impossible opened around them. Just as quickly, the glow sank back to that strange, color-stripped stark light. c Max jammed his hands in his pockets. Cookie crumbs crudded his hands. Betty stood. Her shadow fell on Max’s mom. The world wasn’t regular yet, the shadows still prickly and alive, as if the world might head in a completely different direction, not determined by humans. “Rita, your copy of our agreement is on the kitchen table.

This’ll move along. Everything will be fine, fine.”

His mom rubbed one eye with a thumbtip, folded throwaway glasses in her hand. She trailed Betty into the house. Across the road, Jenn leaned out the Darling door, sequin pants gleaming.

“Suzy!”

“Could have called that one. Max, you hang here. I’ll bring back your bike, kiddo.” She jogged over, staring up at the sky.

Max wandered to the cedar clump. He stashed his orange and purple glasses in a branch crook.

The tree stumps he and Dada had used for chairs were swept away in the flood, so he huddled into the nest of raised tree roots, crooked, uncomfortable. In the roof of branches, redwing blackbirds whirred and clicked, the language he couldn’t understand.

“Max.” His mom walked between the trees.

She held a blue plate with what looked like a chocolate raft in a pond of glistening pudding.

“Eclipse cake.” She laid the glass plate in his hand. The offering was still warm from the oven.

—Brett Ann Stanciu v e r mon t al m anac | vol u m e v

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Haiku

n 2017, writer George Bellerose suggested to his local Weybridge select board that the town have a poet laureate.

Clearly, a town that has “fence viewers” should also have an official poet. The select board agreed and, perhaps thinking this was too formidable a job for one poet, appointed two: Julia Alvarez and Jay Parini. These two, perhaps eager to earn their keep and not just be figureheads, started an annual haiku contest as a way of encouraging the town’s residents to put into words – but not too many words – what the town of Weybridge means to them. In that first contest, 14 people wrote 70 haikus.

Weybridge residents of all ages were encouraged to write three lines with 5-7-5 syllables respectively (as the Japanese form of poetry calls for), which were judged by the poet laureates. These two have since passed the judging responsibility on to the prior year’s contest winners.

Recently, the haiku contest has been open not just to Weybridge residents but to all Vermonters. In 2023, 53 writers submitted 326 haikus.

“In the past, we have had delightful haikus on the lives of squirrels, the joys of mud season, and playful ruminations on bears, bees, and birds,” said Martha Winant, a past contest winner and judge of the 2024 contest. “Winning” is secondary, say the contest’s three most recent judges: Gwen Nagy-Benson, Susie Davis, and Winant. The purpose is to celebrate the joys of poetry for everyone, especially during April, National Poetry Month.

As Julia Alvarez says, “In dire and bleak times, there is even more of a need to find and create moments of connection and hope. Sometimes the ‘hope’ lies in accurate seeing and naming. A haiku can give us a way to frame and contain that darkness, and by sharing it with others we create community and connection, which might be the path forward. I would be sad if all the haikus were gloom and doom.”

Here are 2024’s first place winners in the contest’s four categories.

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Liam Gourlay, Shelburne Here is a circle There are more everywhere But they are all pointless we ybridge

Spence Putnam, Weybridge Small town gatherings Help build strong communities Potlucks and picnics vermont

David Mook, Poultney Each word, a needle, poetic acupuncture, pen pricks on a page. best haikus

abou t haikus

Martha Sanborn, Vergennes My midnight haiku resembling sheer brilliance now; garbage in morning.

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The Courage to Look at Darkness 2024 marked the 150-year anniversary of Robert Frost’s birth, and the legislature asked author Megan Mayhew-Bergman to offer the opening devotional to the Vermont State House. A new resolution honoring Robert Frost was going to the floor. “I hesitated at first to say yes to the speaking engagement,” wrote MayhewBerman, “not because I wasn’t honored, but because I have a complex relationship with Robert Frost. Could I find a way through that represented my true feelings – that Frost was an important poet but not a great human being? That there are many other poets also worthy of our attention and celebration?”

She decided to take the speaking gig – her remarks have been slightly revised and reprinted following this introduction – in part because it gave her the opportunity to bring up bigger ideas. “One of the advantages of having a better seat at the table these days is that I can open up conversations and doors in ways that I couldn’t before,” Mayhew-Berman explained. “So if I can complicate our collective understanding of a subject (Frost) or shine the spotlight on people who deserve a little more attention (Vermont’s many excellent poets), I do.”

ALTON H. BLACKINGTON COLLECTION, ROBERT S. COX SCUA RESEARCH CENTER, UMASS AMHERST LIBRARIES

At home in South Shaftsbury, 1921.

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et me begin with an inelegant confession: I became a writer because I loved Nancy Drew.

Old inns, soft mysteries, an antique clock with a message inside. This is not something a literary academic brags about, but it’s true.

It is this obsession with Nancy Drew that led my friend to walk me through an abandoned house in Shaftsbury. While there, I found a box of pamphlets and letters. On the top was an original Christmas card from Robert Frost. I gasped. The paper was dusty but thick and well-preserved. Holding it was like touching history, touching an old part of Vermont that feels precious, possibly even fleeting.

Every Christmas, first in 1929 and annually from 1934-1962, Robert Frost printed small chapbooks filled with poetry and woodcuts by artists like JJ Lankes, whom Frost bonded with over a love of the simple and primitive. Together they distrusted technology and the thrust of socalled progress. They admired gnarled apple trees, farming, hard work, authenticity.

In his 1937 Christmas card, Frost penned a biting poem called “Letter to a Young Wretch,” a pointed response to a young boy who cut down a birch tree on Frost’s property in Shaftsbury. …I could have bought you just as good a tree To frizzle resin in a candle flame, And what saving it would have meant to me.

But tree by charity is not the same As tree by enterprise and expedition.

I must not spoil your Christmas with contrition.

It is your Christmases against my woods.

But even where, thus, opposing interests kill, They are to be thought of as opposing goods Oftener than as conflicting good and evil; Which makes the war god seem no special dunce For always fighting on both sides at once…

Frost sometimes titled this poem “Boethius” – a nod to a Roman philosopher who believed that humans often fail to recognize evil as part of a divine whole. Evil is everywhere, a part of life. It is, as philosopher Hannah Arendt once implied, stor ie s f r om & f or t h e l an d

ordinary and banal. Frost saw that darkness in our snow-drenched landscape and gray skies, in warring nations, in neighbors, and in himself.

I myself feel drawn to writing that acknowledges life as it really is, not just as we want it to be.

There is a strain of darkness running through the world and even within each of us, and Frost wasn’t afraid to look at it. lodged

The rain to the wind said, “ You push and I’ll pelt.”

They so smote the garden bed That the flowers actually knelt And lay lodged – though not dead.

I know how the flowers felt.

As mud season swallows us, each of us knows this faded-flower feeling Frost spoke of. We know it physically and spiritually. All of us fold and rise.

Frost is an inarguable hero of letters, but not necessarily a hero of humanity. He was, by many accounts, a troubled and flawed friend, father, and partner. He had a reputation as a brooding poet – he once lit a manuscript on fire in a moment of professional jealousy. I do not want to make a hero out of him as a human, only as an artist who walked us into the modern era of poetry – penning his most significant and Pulitzer prizewinning work from a stone house in southern Vermont, two miles south of my own.

Frost’s poems are agricultural and represent a sort of baseline from which we can measure change. They speak of deep snows, family farms, horses, aspects of life in Vermont which are both iconic and lesser seen today. Frost didn’t just romanticize or reflect rural life – he gave ordinary rural life depth and dignity, an act of defiance as the world began to move in faster and more industrial directions. These depictions of rural life are part of the iconography surrounding Vermont.

As someone who once taught at Bennington College, oversaw the College’s acquisition of Frost’s Stone House in Shaftsbury, and who now directs the Bread Loaf Environmental

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Writers’ Conference at Middlebury – one of Frosts’ longest associations – I am thankful for the bedrock he provides for Vermont’s literary culture. It’s like a stone-cold slab of marble that we built a progressive and nature-forward literary culture upon.

Think of the incredible poets Vermont has birthed or housed: Mary Oliver, who worked at Bennington for years. Mary Ruefle. Sydney Lea. Major Jackson. Louise Gluck. Dan Chiasson.

Ruth Stone and her granddaughter Bianca. Jay Parini. And all of the poets who orbit around Bennington College, VCFA, UVM, Middlebury, and Bread Loaf.

I ask you also to consider the value of the humanities in this fraught moment – as nature degrades in front of our eyes, and we fall into the seduction of screens, numb in the face of unspeakable acts of violence. Think of the way we

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nothing gold can stay

Nature’s first green is gold, Her hardest hue to hold.

Her early leaf ’s a flower; But only so an hour.

Then leaf subsides to leaf.

So Eden sank to grief, So dawn goes down to day.

Nothing gold can stay.

—Megan Mayhew-Bergman

Whose Woods These Were

hen Fred Hoyt, former chief custodian at Arlington High School, lay dying of cancer in 2007, his friend Ken Nicholson, who had been a biology teacher at the school, was visiting him at home. Ken noticed a volume

by Robert Frost on the bedside table, laid open at a poem with the odd title of “To a Young Wretch.”

Ken asked, “What exactly is a wretch, Fred?”

“It was me. I was the wretch,” Hoyt replied.

“Seventy-one years ago…”

The year was 1936.

Christmas was coming. Freddie Hoyt, the fourth of seven children, had just turned nine and decided that he was ready 169

turn to poetry and the humanities in our lowest moments. Think of the value of natural beauty and justice. Think of timeless poems like Frost’s as accessible solace in these moments, and try to hear them again with fresh ears – to feel the melancholy beneath, the nod to impermanence and grief that feels suddenly modern:

for the man’s job of bringing home the family Christmas tree. There was no money to buy one in those hard years, so he took his father’s axe and set forth from the Hoyt house in the village of South Shaftsbury toward well-forested Buck Hill. He took along his fiveyear-old pal Chuck Downing, perhaps as a lookout. A mile up the road Fred saw the tree he wanted, a beautiful young spruce. It was on a hillside in sight of a house, but no one appeared to be at home. A few strokes of the axe, and the boys headed back with their booty.

Whose woods those were, they did not know. They belonged to Robert Frost, who was most likely away in Texas at the time. Frost had lived in

South Shaftsbury off and on since 1920, first at what is now the Robert Frost Stone House Museum, then at the property known as the Gully, off Buck Hill Road. Constable Floyd Holliday, who took care of the Gully for the Frosts when they were away, was on his way to check on the house when he saw the boys on the road with the tree. He asked where they had gotten it. “Up Buck Hill somewhere.” Holliday soon discovered their telltale tracks in the snow, and before long he was knocking on the Hoyt family’s front door.

Fred’s father opened it and listened patiently. He told the constable that he would take care of matters in regard to his son. When young Fred v e r mon t al m anac | vol u m e v

PHIL HOLLAND

PHOTO COURTESY OF SANDY (HOYT) KNIGHT

came out of hiding (for he had understood that his triumph had turned to trouble), his father “gave him a whupping,” as he later expressed it to Ken Nicholson. In those days, “a whupping” was administered on the backside with a belt.

Justice was served, Old Testament style.

Or was there another way to look at the boys’ transgression?

This was not the first time that trees on Frost’s 153 acres had been poached (by “riffraff from Bennington,” as the poet once groused in a letter to a friend), and the repeated thefts were upsetting to him.

In this instance, the aggrieved landowner (and tree farmer) in Frost contended with the poet – and Christian – in him, and “To a Young Wretch” was born. The poem was first printed as the Frost’s Christmas card for 1937 with a colored woodcut by the poet’s collaborator and friend, the artist J.J. Lankes.

Frost thought well enough of “To a Young Wretch” to include it in his next collection,

Left: 9-year-old Fred Hoyt Right: Chuck Downing (age 93), the wretch’s accomplice A Witness Tree, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1943. By that time, following the death of his wife, Elinor, in 1938, Frost had moved away from South Shaftsbury, making a new home base in Ripton.

Fred Hoyt grew up to become an upstanding citizen, serving in the Navy, taking care of Arlington High, and raising four children with his wife

Connie; Chuck Downing (who got off with a stern reprimand in 1936), after a stint in the Air Force and a career as a machine operator and factory foreman, is a hale 93-year-old resident of Bennington, father of two with his wife Barbara – and always ready with vivid recollections of his and Fred’s immortal adventure. —Phil Holland

SPECIAL COLLECTIONS, MIDDLEBURY COLLEGE

J. J. Lankes created the Frosts’ 1937 Christmas card. stor ie s f r om & f or t h e l an d

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Tapping in 1947 Inset: Tapping the same tree in 2014

Here’s to family breakfasts.

Here’s to food that tastes like the place it came from.

Here’s to craft that’s passed down through the generations.

Here’s to local products made by local people.

Here’s to the resilience that keeps rural industries afloat.

Here’s to the hope, and ambition, and hard work behind new endeavors.

MANCE FAMILY TREE FARM

is proud to support the Vermont Almanac.

We Ship! Order today at m a n c e m a p l e . c o m 171

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Life Lessons

MARY LAKE

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hortly after my first son was born, I went out to be with the sheep. I had him tucked in my jacket, close to my chest. I struggled to sit down beside some ewes with their newborns. My son gave a little cry and the ewes looked at me, startled to hear an unfamiliar noise. I opened my jacket and showed the sheep my little baby. The barn went silent. The sheep looked at us, then looked at their babies and back at me. “I’ve got one, too.” I smiled, feeling part of the flock, the sisterhood.

I have two sons now, and they are very connected to the flock. We’ve used the sheep as a platform to dive into topics such as where babies come from, skeletal/ digestive/respiratory systems, bullying, communication, and nutrition. Probably the most important topics we’ve discussed in depth are death and grieving.

This spring, toward the end of lambing, we noticed that one ewe wasn’t standing on one of her back legs. She had broken her femur and was still nursing a set of three-week-old twins. I had the vet out to talk to us about what we should do. We went through the options and decided on putting the ewe down and feeding the lambs ourselves. We’ve put sheep down before, but never one in such pain, and never one with such young lambs. The thought of lambs losing their mom was hard for my sons, ages six and nine. They understood it was the best thing to do, but still didn’t like this hard decision.

It was a hard shot for me to take. I’m a professional butcher. I’ve slaughtered thousands of sheep. This was different because it wasn’t planned. This ewe wasn’t going on to feed people or bring them comfort with her sheepskin. I wasn’t expecting to have to do this and leave her lambs without a mother. I was able to put her down and, fortunately, the lambs transitioned easily to a new feeding plan.

If they had struggled or cried for her, I don’t know what I’d have done.

Later that day, within an hour or so, we received the worst news ever. A friend of ours had died in a head-on car collision, leaving behind her husband and twoyear-old daughter. The shock of the accident left us hollow and stunned. My nine-year-old’s first question was whether her daughter was still breast-feeding.

He was wondering how our two-year-old human friend would be fed without her mother. I explained that her dad would feed her and take care of her. She would be ok. My son was silent for a minute and then said sadly, “Two moms died today.”

I held him close that night. We talked about how the deaths were similar and different. How we will mourn for our friend and how we will honor our sheep. I try to keep livestock lifecycles and human lifecycles in two different compartments.

It’s not because I’m callous or uncaring, but because I want to farm in a way that is most beneficial to the animals, soil, and community. To do that, I must be thoughtful and pragmatic. I need to care for my sheep, and remember these creatures are not people. My responsibility to them is different. But sometimes my livestock experiences and my human experiences are so relative and similar and synchronized. That is probably when farming is the best and the worst. The most blissful and the most devastating. It is also when my vision can become cloudy, and I can lose focus on my goal.

There are easy seasons and hard seasons. This one was both, but mostly hard.

We had so many beautiful, sweet-smelling, healthy lambs, but we lost a sheep mom and a human mom. I lost two sisters. This was a season we will never forget.

It showed us that life can be really unfair. We can lose things we love. And that we are strong and brave to love like we do. —Mary Lake

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Yes! Wow! Thank You!

a tribu te to roset ta “ zet t y ” morse weber

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ay 6, 2024, Eric Morse, bereaved father, raised his hand to be recognized.

Contention was ripping through Guilford, a town of 2,100; this selectboard meeting was typical. Steadying his voice: “Some of you know our daughter Rosetta was killed in a terrible traffic accident three weeks ago. She was a product of this town, our local school system, University of Vermont. We should be proud of her lifelong commitment to service. She worked through hard problems, bringing people together.” He urged us to think of something nice to say to an adversary. Before leaving, he shared a tiny poem by Muhammad Ali: “Me. We.” c In her 39 years, Rosetta Morse Weber grew from a sunny, sedentary child into an endurance athlete with a thirst for adventure. She became a visionary leader and mentor in “positive youth development.” A coworker wrote, “She brilliantly embodied all our hopes for the youth we serve.”

Another said, “She had the ability to let things go that didn't represent someone at their best.”

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To kids, she was like a down-to-earth goddess, radiating confidence, curiosity, and joy – YES! WOW! THANK YOU! c Rosetta “Zetty” Morse and her brother Skye grew up in a close-knit, back-to-the-land neighborhood, exploring the hills with free-range friends, hanging out at each other’s unfinished homes. Her parents Eric, a surveyor, and Dale, a primary teacher at Guilford School, recall her “metamorphosis” into a rugged girl. “Zetty had strep or a flu. Went to bed, and five days later, another person emerged, taller, stronger. We all felt it was like a caterpillar-monarch change.”

“I just got nine stitches over my eye.” Zetty left this message on the answering machine during her second summer away from home. “I wiped out on the highway, but I’m staying at camp.” She helped the nurse in the infirmary while healing, and returned to the trail, hiking, biking and canoeing. Zetty’s years with Camp Merrowvista in the Ossipee Mountains of New Hampshire would continue to shape her life. She took their values to v e r mon t al m anac | vol u m e v

heart: “Aspire Nobly • Adventure Daringly • Serve Humbly,” and their motto, “My own self, at my very best, all the time.”

Back home, Zetty graduated from grade eight as “Guilford’s Highest Average Girl.” The phrase became a family joke. She took up the cello and recorder. Following her light-footed brother Skye, she began running up their steep dirt road. On the high school cross country team, she worked her way from last place; her effort was noted as “most improved.” Persevering, she shared racing tips in a school essay: “[S]tart with a slow-paced jog through the woods, then a long stretch…

Compete against yourself, and give it your all.”

I’m a winter baby, born in February. Rosetta wrote in a letter with a resume. My parents would bundle me up, tuck me into a baby toboggan and put me out in the snow, sun shining, to nap. Sledding birthday parties turned to Nordic ski adventures, turned to riding the T-bar at night, the snow sparkling under the lights. College brought winter camping trips and my early introductions to backcountry skiing… across the country and back again numerous times – chasing snow, earning turns – but always landing back in Vermont. c “Glide” and “gladness” spring from one etymological root, meaning “shine.” Zetty embodied this connection. With the Chill Foundation, a Vermont-based nonprofit, she promoted the message of resilience for at-risk youth, Ride.

Inspire. Lead. Chill spun from the huge success of Burton Snowboards, the Vermont start-up, launched from a borrowed shop in Londonderry.

Jake Burton Carpenter, snow aficionado, Wall Street drop-out, taught himself woodworking to fashion superior snowboards. With business savvy and a renegade vision, he built Burton’s brand and culture to match. That early fraternity of white, wild, sideways riders raced beyond groomed trails and paywalls, across pristine hills. Donna Carpenter, Jake’s wife and partner, noted who was missing from the slopes and their community; they took action to address this. Both Burton and Chill committed resources to welcoming people from different demographics and social classes.

They strengthened their focus on survival and stor ie s f r om & f or t h e l an d

sustainability, to preserve winter on our planet.

Zetty framed Chill’s core values in practice: [W]e challenge youth to step outside their comfort zone and into their growth zone… Pretty soon, what was their growth zone is now a part of their comfort zone.

And their growth zone is now new territory, which a few weeks ago may have been in their danger zone.

It’s all about incremental growth, knowing personal limits, and having support to make that choice. Zetty helped to elevate Chill from a regional nonprofit with a small staff to an international organization active in 24 sites across nine countries. To snowboards, Chill added skateboard, surfboard, and paddleboard programs, designed to welcome underserved youth (30,000, so far) and to develop pathways toward careers in outdoor recreation. c When Zetty met Parker Weber, she began telecommuting with Chill. In Scamp, the camper he customized, with Shadow their dog, they traveled between Vermont and Wyoming, bigmountain back-country skiing, surfing, mountain biking, and rock-climbing wherever they pleased.

2018, they wed on Belden Hill in Guilford. Zetty hitched up her wedding dress; they straddled mountain bikes and flew toward their future. In 2021, they welcomed daughter Bridger, named for mountain ranges they’d scale together. Parker built their home by hand at the foothills near Mount Ellen and Sugarbush Ski Area. c According to Zetty, there are two kinds of days, gold and silver, sunny or rainy, and both were fine with her. On April 11, a silver morning, Zetty set out for work. The young driver of an 18-wheeler carrying bagged mulch from Canada, swerving erratically, crossed the median. Zetty’s grave is beside the summit of Belden Hill, where she and Parker said their vows. c Parker writes, “Rosetta was a jewel in her life.

Everyone she met knew it. She made people feel loved and listened to. I think kindness was at her center. Glowing. Making her cheeks rosy.”

—Verandah Porche

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More Summer than Spring

pring proper – that glorious rush of green and blossom – arrived one to two weeks early this year. The opening day of turkey season is always May 1, and in southern Vermont, anyway, it used to be that there was a solid week to 10 days before the leaves started opening and obscuring the understory. This year hunters in southern Vermont were peering around unfurling leaves on opening morning. If the turkey hunting was slow, they could have transitioned to hunting for morels, which were also out early. It wasn’t long before the fiddleheads joined them. By mid-May, you’d have wanted to have all your springtime ephemeral foraging done, as the foliage raced up the mountainsides and the canopy closed. Reports from central and northern Vermont were similar, though slightly later.

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One of the interesting ecological phenomena we noted this year was the number of dandelions.

Many lawns and meadows were just filthy with them. Maybe it was all the rain we had last summer that set the stage for this year’s bumper crop. Maybe it was the warm winter. Maybe it was a combination of the two things, exacerbated by the no-mow-May movement, which is likely creating a seed source that didn’t used to exist in quite such a prolific way. Come fall, the apple crop seemed especially good, in response to banner May blossoms on apple trees.

The big weather story in May 2023 was the hard frost that came on May 18, when temperatures dropped into the upper teens and low 20s throughout much of Vermont, decimating a lot of flowers. (Could that have had something to

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do with the profusion of dandelions and apple blossoms this year?) In 2024, May 18 was the first day of the year that Burlington hit 80 degrees.

The low that night was in the 50s in most places.

In fact, the lowest temperature recorded during the entire month in Burlington was 44 degrees on May 1. Matt Sutkoski, in his blog Matt’s Weather Rapport, reported that there have been only four Mays in the last 124 years when the temperature stayed above 40 degrees for the entire month. In 89 of those years there was at least one night with frost.

The heat continued as the month went on, with Burlington seeing 90 degrees on May 22.

The city would go on to have its second-warmest May on record. An average of weather stations across Vermont indicates it was the state’s fourth-warmest May. The average temperatures in March, April, and May also constituted the state’s fourth-warmest meteorological spring.

On May 10, just about one month after the amazing solar eclipse, another noteworthy sun-related celestial event graced our skies, this time in the form of a northern lights display.

“Northern lights” occur when solar flares blow apart pieces of the sun’s corona – those wispy atmospherics we were looking at during the eclipse. This coronal material, which is made of plasma that carries an embedded magnetic field, can travel at speeds as fast as 3,000 kilometers a second, which allows it to cover the 193 million miles between the sun and earth in as little as 15 hours. When the solar particles mix with the gases in our atmosphere, they turn colors. The greens and reds are associated with oxygen, the blues and purples with nitrogen.

All these colors then blend to make the unique color combinations of an auroral palette.

(If you’re less interested in the science and more intrigued by the mysterious look of this phenomenon, read on…)

Dandelions took over Vermont lawns in May 2024.

We looked back at our weather summaries from the past four volumes of the Vermont Almanac and saw that May 2023 was dry and cool; May 2022 was the previous fourth-warmest May on record before being knocked back a place this year; May 2021 was quirky in that there was a snowstorm on the 1st and another on Memorial Day weekend; May 2020 was noteworthy for a Mother’s Day storm that dumped 10 inches of snow in southern Vermont. stor ie s f r om & f or t h e l an d

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leath : Did you know that the northern lights

leath : A couple nights ago you saw the

are also called the aurora borealis? The name was invented in 1619 by the famous scientist Galileo.

The word aurora comes from the Roman goddess of the dawn – think of a sunrise with a lot of wild colors – and the word borealis comes from the Greek name for the north wind. If you were to name what you saw in the sky after some sort of magical being, what might you name it?

daisy : At first it was cloudy. Then the sky got

leath : What do you think causes the

Phone interview with my 6-year-old niece, Daisy, and my 4-year-old nephew, Dean.

May 13, 2024, Waterbury —Leath Tonino

northern lights for the first time. What did you see?

a little brighter and started to turn red and pink.

Then it was green glowing stripes. We waited fifteen minutes longer and saw a purply-blue-red place at the top of the sky where all the stripes were connecting. The funny thing was this: the clouds came back and you could hardly see anything. Then it cleared. Over and over again. leath : Some people describe the northern

lights as curtains, veils, rays, spirals.

How would you describe what you saw?

daisy : Stripes. Alive stripes. A rainbow. leath : Wow, a nighttime rainbow.

Where were you?

daisy : The golf course by my house. We went

up there with my cousin Ezra and my little brother Dean and my dad Ari and my cousin Ezra. We watched from this hilly place around ten-thirty at night. leath : What would you have normally been

doing at that time?

daisy : Trying to fall asleep.

dean : Uncle Leafy! Uncle Leafy! leath : Yo.

[My sister, Molly, interjects to say that Dean does not consent to being interviewed about the northern lights, but that he would be happy to talk to me about frogs. In fact, he is running toward the phone with his bucket and net.] daisy : Dean, you can tell him after! We’re still

talking! What’s next?

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daisy : I’d call it The Rainbow of the Night.

northern lights?

[My sister interjects to say that she is leaving the phone with the kids in order to pee.] dean : Hey Uncle Leafy, I’ve got a frog!

daisy : I have an idea for the cause: three

rainbows, or five rainbows combineded [sic]. leath : I’m not a scientist, so the following

may be a little off, but I’ve read that they are caused by disturbances in the earth’s magnetosphere triggered by solar winds that have been sped up due to coronal mass ejections.

The disturbances alter the trajectories of charged particles in the magnetospheric plasma and this leads to the emission of light that varies in color and complexity.

daisy : I do not understand a word you’re saying. leath : What about a tie-dye dragon that

lives at the North Pole and is belching and farting… possible?

daisy : I don’t really get how that would work. leath : Did any of your stuffed animals come

outside to see the northern lights?

daisy : Basically all of them. They liked it.

It was the first time for them, too. Kono is a manatee from Florida. But I can’t find her right now. leath : Did anybody get scared and think it

was UFOs and aliens?

daisy : My brother thought it was maybe a

spaceship coming down, like the size of a house. v e r mon t al m anac | vol u m e v

ANDI COLNES

leath : How do you think seeing the

northern lights compared to the solar eclipse you saw recently? daisy : I think it was way cooler. The moon

covering the sun in the middle of the day, okay, pretty cool, but seeing colorful lights shining on you during the night is really, really cool. And seeing them move… it looked like they were literally dancing. leath : Did you have any special dreams

that night?

daisy : Yeah. I dreamed I was in Vermont doing

art with my friends Layla, Cyrus, Marshall, and Fitz. And May. And Caroline. Then we got a call from the northern lights. They said: “Help us, help us, somebody is trying to catch us and gobble us up.” So we rode a plane and got to the northern lights. Goblins were trying to catch them with lassos and eat them all up. We fought the goblins. When that was over, the northern lights picked us up and threw us in the sky and then catched [sic] us and put us back down. stor ie s f r om & f or t h e l an d

leath : Would you rather see the northern

lights again or eat an ice cream cone? daisy : The northern lights.

leath : What about the northern lights versus

eating an ice cream cone and staying up late partying with me? daisy : The northern lights.

leath : Ouch! Dean, would you rather see

the northern lights or hunt around in a pond for sea creatures?

dean : Hunt around in a pond for sea creatures. daisy : Leafy, we got a class pet. Tadpoles!

dean : Leafy, we found salamanders and frogs

and tadpoles yesterday. I tried catching this frog, but it got away from me. And guess what? Dad caught two frogs. leath : That’s awesome.

dean : I’m going to hang up now. Bye.

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e may landscape , evening

Orion has retired early in the northwest, trailed by faithful Sirius, perhaps hoping it will be quieter on the other side of the globe, for the concert here is in full swing.

Spring peeper calls are filling the world, the sound ringing, jingling everywhere, for miles and miles and miles.

There must be millions in voice to lay down this solid wall of sound and each one is screaming at the top of his voice “Come! Come!

See my perfect blade of grass!

Come to my perfect cattail leaf !” —Joan Waltermire cold hollow to canada , a non-

profit devoted to conserving a significant wildlife corridor in northern Vermont, held its first annual trail camera contest this past winter. There were 55 great entries that can be seen on their website (coldhollowtocanada.org), but this May shot of a mother and cub jumped out.

If you flip to the Nature Notes section in August, you’ll see a shot of the same mother and bear, in the same spot, three months later.

we reported in volume iv that 2023 was a

prolific maple seed year, and sure enough, come May 2024, the forest floors in many areas of Vermont were carpeted with maple seedlings

JOAN HILDRETH

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Worming Their Way In

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sian jumping worms can easily be distinguished from the 30 or so European earthworm species that arrived in this country with colonists, beginning about 300 years ago. The Asian worms wriggle much more actively – hence the jumping name; but they don’t really jump – and the ring of lighter-colored tissue, the clitellum, completely encircles the worm’s body, which it doesn’t do in any of the European ones.

They also have an unusually large mouth.

The worms’ population can reach 120 adults per square meter, and they are voracious consumers of organic matter and destroy mycorrhizal networks, leaving soils impoverished. Their effect on soil is distinctive. Leaf litter is gone and it looks as though coffee grounds have been scattered on the surface.

Curiously, some of these Asian worms, mostly in the genus Amynthas, have been in North America since at least 1867, but they’ve become serious forest and garden pests only during the past 20 or so years. They probably first arrived in Vermont a couple of decades ago and they now occur in most of the state. Two species, Amynthas tokionensis and the larger Amynthas agrestis, account for about 95 percent of these newcomers.

Adults don’t live through the winter, but before dying each one can leave about 60 eggs, housed for

the winter in protective cocoons. Most of the adults are females that reproduce parthenogenetically, but instances of sexual reproduction may occur. The springtime hatchlings are tiny, but by August are large enough to begin creating the next generation.

Plants from nurseries and garden centers have often been the source of new infestations.

The worms then spread from gardens to nearby forests. In the garden, worm population can be reduced, but not eliminated, by covering the soil with clear plastic during a warm, sunny stretch in May or June. These worms tend to stay near the surface, and 105-degree temperatures will kill them. A second solar cooking in October will set back the cocoon population.

Dr. Josef Hubert Gorres, Dr. Maryam Nouri Aiin, and Joseph J. Schall, all at UVM, are on the forefront of jumping worm research nationwide.

The fungus Beauvaria bassiana is widely used to kill insect pests, but their preliminary studies suggest that it could perhaps be formulated to be effective against jumping worms. They also are studying Apolocystis bosanqueti, a parasite of many invertebrates, including Amynthas agrestis.

Sadly, the Asian jumping worm problem is likely to get much worse before a way is found to control this destructive invasive species. —Virginia Barlow

JOSEPH BERGER / BUGWOOD.ORG

TOM POTTERFIELD / CC

jumping worm

(Amynthas agrestis) Thrash and twitch Shiny, slightly iridescent, and grey-brown Milky-white ring (clitellum) Mostly dry stor ie s f r om & f or t h e l an d

commom earthworm

(Lumbricus terrestris) Wiggle gently Dull red-brown Reddish ring (clitellum) Slimy

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A Once-in-a-Century Discovery

n May, Molly Parren, a biologist with the State of Vermont, was out surveying turtle habitat when she came across some wild meadow garlic, a rare plant in Addison County. She snapped a picture and sent it to Vermont State Botanist Grace Glynn, who immediately noticed false mermaid-weed (Floerkea proserpinacoides) in the foreground of the picture. False mermaid-weed hasn’t been documented in Vermont for more than a century, and Grace has been looking for it for years.

“There was a lot of screaming,” Ms. Glynn acknowledged of her own reaction when she noticed the Floerkea in the photo – that line is from a New York Times story on the discovery. There were also stories from NPR, the Associated Press, Smithsonian Magazine – literally millions of people the world over read the news. We reached out to Grace to get her take on all this.

species every year, and the rediscovery of the federally threatened small whorled pogonia in 2022 also received national attention. But I think the public’s excitement speaks to a growing interest in native plants and a growing urgency around conservation in the face of the biodiversity crisis.

It’s probably also true that people are desperate for any bit of good news to quell the existential dread and horrors of our modern world. Anyway, rare plants are often less charismatic and relatable than animals and are often overlooked, and so I was thrilled to see them get their moment in the spotlight. It’s particularly amazing to me because false

mermaid-weed is an obscure, tiny plant. It’s not showy by any stretch of the imagination. It’s not carnivorous, it’s not known to be a host plant for any rare butterfly. Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine that it would become somewhat of a household name in Vermont or be featured in The New York Times. It’s my hope that the national attention prompts folks to engage with Natural Heritage Programs in their own states, to learn what discoveries scientists have made there recently. There are field biologists working behind the scenes in every state to better understand our native biodiversity so that we can conserve our most imperiled plants and animals.

it was cool to see the

discovery get so much national at tention .

what has the national exposure been like ?

I’ve been really surprised at the amount of media interest and engagement from the public.

Sometimes I worry that the public will get rare-plantrediscovery fatigue. Botanists are rediscovering state historic 185

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thing that intrigued me about Floerkea was its ephemeral nature. Because it’s only visible for about four to six weeks each year, I believed there was a good chance that it was still present on the landscape and merely overlooked. And it was! More generally, I love finding obscure, inconspicuous plants. And the truth is that it’s not terribly difficult to rediscover statehistoric species if you specialize in the obscure. For example, our bryologists rediscover multiple state-historic mosses and liverworts every year, simply because very few people are out there looking for these cryptic plants. is there a plant , or a VERMONT FISH & WILDLIFE DEPARTMENT

handful of plants , from the historical plant list that you ’ re especially keen to find next ?

Vermont State Botanist Grace Glynn surveys false mermaid-weed after it was rediscovered in Addison County. in the times piece ,

the au thor suggests

you ’ d been searching for this plant for

years in vain . is this

accurate ? and if so ,

what was it abou t this

plant that so cap tured your imagination ?

Yes. I’ve searched for this plant every spring for the past four years, sometimes on hands and knees in the marshes and stor ie s f r om & f or t h e l an d

floodplains of our historic sites for this species, in Shelburne and Rutland. Each year I turned up empty-handed, but it’s the knowledge that the plants could be hiding in plain sight around any corner that keeps the botanist returning year after year. Even in a small state like Vermont, there’s a lot of habitat that has never been searched with an eye for obscure rare plants. The main

Yes! The next plants on my list are American water willow (Justicia americana), which hasn’t been seen in Vermont since 1819, and autumn water-starwort (Callitriche hermaphroditica), which hasn’t been seen since 1929. They both grow in shallow-water marshes and one would likely need a boat to find them. There are other obscure state-historic aquatic plants that are very likely hiding in plain sight in our lakes and ponds – it’s an understudied group. Many native species are also shifting their ranges with climate change, and we expect to see new-to-Vermont species continue to pop up and join our flora in the coming years.

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Keeping Deer Out of the Garden: The Two-Fence Method

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to tighten the fence, when needed. I can easily remove the wire of the auxiliary fence for easy mowing, draping it over the electric fence posts of my main fence to hold the wire out of the way of the mower.

My fields are full of clover, grasses, and native plants to delight the deer. Now my vegetables grow unimpeded and make it to my own dinner table intact. —Joyce Amsden

JOYCE AMSDEN

y garden often doubles as a wildlife restaurant. Gorgeous white-tailed deer are frequent diners, demolishing kale, cabbages, carrots, tomatoes. Most of my attempts to keep them out have been of limited effectiveness.

The deer become accustomed to sound deterrents.

Odor deterrents must be applied repeatedly and immediately after each rainfall. Plus the odoriferous products are expensive and the scent of putrescent eggs is not pleasant for anyone.

Fortunately I have discovered an effective (and odor-free) exclusion method that relies simply on understanding the nature of white-tailed deer: They don’t like to jump into confined spaces, or spaces where they can’t detect a clear landing area.

In addition, they can jump very high vertically but not long distances horizontally. If your garden is made of raised beds, the beds themselves might confuse the landing area and a simple fence will likely work. Be sure to install it far enough away from your beds that the deer can’t just reach through your fence and nibble your plants.

Because my garden is almost large enough to land a helicopter, the deer were very comfortable jumping my fence. The solution came when I installed a second, simple fence outside the first to create the illusion of a confusing landing area.

It has worked flawlessly for several years now.

I installed my second (non-electrified) fence about four feet from my four-foot-high, threestrand electric fence. I repurposed lengths of electric fence that were worn out or damaged. You could also use any other type of string or rope – clothesline, for example.

I used saplings and garden stakes for posts, and put a screw in each at waist height. This allows me to keep the outer fence from sagging. I just give it another wrap or two around the screw

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F

Grow a Tree From a Seed

ew gardening endeavors are as fulfilling as growing a tree from a seed. Maybe part of this thrill is atonement – most rural people spend lots of time killing trees and partitioning their carcasses for the woodstove, so it’s really nice to be involved in the birthing process. But there’s a deeper, more spiritual dimension to the pleasure, too. The Indian writer and painter Rabindranath Tagore once wrote: “The one who plants trees, knowing that he will never sit in their shade, has at least started to understand the meaning of life.”

It’s like that.

In any case, why not grow a native tree from seed this year?

Some species, like cottonwood, red maple, and sycamore, have seeds that are viable in spring. A good way to get started is to collect the seed and place it in a sealed plastic bag with a moist paper towel. Keep an eye on the bag and confirm that there’s condensation inside – if not, moisten the paper towel again.

After about a week, the seed should germinate, at which point it can go into a potting soil mix.

Many seeds, of course, mature in the fall, and these will benefit from cold stratification. You could just plant them in a garden bed and wait until spring. A mouse-and-vole-proof alternative method is to store the seed in a plastic bag in your refrigerator crisper drawer. The following chart gives you an idea of when to collect and plant seed from a variety of popular native hardwoods.

It’s hard to believe these tiny sycamore seedlings could someday be 100 feet tall.

seed collecting and planting information when seed is ripe

stratification days

when to plant non-stratified seed

Basswood

Sep-Oct

90

Fall

Birch

Aug-Sep

30-80

Fall

Butternut

Sep-Oct

90-120

Fall

Cherries

Jul-Sep

120

Fall

Cottonwood

May-Jun

NA

Spring

Hickories

Sep-Oct

90

Fall

Red Maple

Mar-May

NA

Spring

Sugar Maple

Sep-Oct

60

Fall

Red Oak

Sep-Oct

30-90

Fall

Sycamore

Apr-May

NA

Spring

Walnut

Sep-Oct

90-150

Fall

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PAUL WRAY, IA EXTENSION

tree type

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Selecting and Caring for Lilacs

s curator of the 100-plus lilacs at the UVM Horticulture Farm, I am amazed at the variety of lilacs we have planted there. But that is just a tiny fraction of the number of lilacs that are registered (1,223) or named (3,561) in the International Lilac Society’s International Registry and Checklist of Cultivar Names in the Genus Syringa L. (Oleaceae).

When planning to add lilacs to your garden, consider color as well as size and location. Colors range from white to yellow, pink, blue, lilac, violet, red, purple, and magenta. Sizes range from compact ('Palibin' or 'Prairie Petite') to simply huge. Plus, different cultivars bloom at different times: you can select from early, mid, and late-season varieties. Syringa x hyacinthifloras are usually the early bloomers, while some S. pubescens (meyeri) bloom twice – in the spring and again in October, with their leaves turning a stunning bronze.

One popular lilac at the Hort Farm is 'Sensation' – the only lilac with a purple blossom edged completely by a white border. The late-flowering 'Miss Kim' is prized for its extraordinary fragrance. Beauty of Moscow™ ('Krasavitsa Moskvy') is considered especially beautiful, but my personal favorite is 'Montaigne,' which is harder to find but worth looking for. For blue, search out 'President Lincoln' or 'President Grevy.' For a distinctive, rich, deep purple-red lilac, check out 'Andenken an Ludwig Spath.' Not all lilacs are shrubs: two examples are the Japanese Tree Lilac (Syringa reticulata) and the Chinese Tree Lilac (S. pekinensis), the latter boasting masses of cream-white flowers after other lilacs have faded.

Lilacs need a cold winter dormant season in order to flower the next growing season. They thrive in full sun, and prefer an alkaline or neutral well-drained soil.

They also prefer to have nothing else growing around their canes – i.e. grasses or weeds. If your lilacs don’t bloom well, try adding garden lime in the fall. To do that, apply the lime around the drip line, where the rain would drip off the outer branches to the ground, as that is where it will be taken up by the finer roots.

Add mulch or compost yearly, but don’t exceed two inches in depth, as that will kill the plant. Also, as with most trees and shrubs, keep the mulch away from the base of the stem. Be aware that soil compaction will kill a lilac, meaning it’s important to keep heavy traffic (including lawn tractors) at least two feet outside of the drip edge.

Dead-heading is best done just after the blossoms fade, as is pruning. Lilacs set next year’s flower buds right after the current year’s flowers have faded, so heavy pruning later in the year will remove these potential blooms. Dead branches can be removed anytime. Be sure to leave some of the suckers growing in and around the lilac, as these will be your future lilacs as the old canes die or are removed to rejuvenate the plant.

For those with a special love for lilacs, I highly recommend joining the International Lilac Society (www.internationallilacsociety.org) to learn from the experts. To download more detailed information on lilac care, visit the Friends of the Hort Farm lilac page at fhfvt.org/collections/lilacs. —Kitty Werner 189

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KITTY WERNER

'Montaigne' at the UVM Horticulture Farm stor ie s f r om & f or t h e l an d

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Power Play

solar grazing keeps the grass down and the land connected to ag .

T

here was likely some grousing when the first power poles and electric lines began to pop up and weave their way around the state – certainly it would have been jarring to see these pieces of modern technology against an otherwise agrarian landscape. Today, they tend to blend into the background: unless you focus on them, you’re unlikely to notice them. Plus, we’ve sort of decided that electricity is pretty nice.

Right now, Vermont is in act two of this play, as solar panels appear in fields and on farms.

Hardly natural looking, these large clusters of photovoltaic cells could be likened to hundreds

of black billboards, all tipped at an angle. And we know how Vermonters feel about billboards.

So, once again, there are some who protest their presence on the Vermont landscape.

Others are focused on integrating solar panels into the landscape – minimizing the aesthetic hit while working to make “solar farms” contributors to, rather than detractors from, Vermont’s agricultural scene. That’s the case at Agrivoltaic Solutions, a small company based in Whiting that specializes in maintaining the vegetation at commercial solar sites with its large flock of sheep.

The enterprise is owned by Lewis Fox and

AGRIVOLTAIC SOLUTIONS

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Niko Kochendoerfer, husband and wife. Fox grew up on his parents’ organic dairy farm in Leicester, and earned a bachelor’s in animal science at Cornell University before working at a dairy farm and then managing a sheep and goat farm in western New York. It was at Cornell that he met Kochendoerfer, who hails from Germany and was earning her PhD in small ruminant nutrition.

The couple ended up renting a sheep farm in Cortland, New York, and while there split a solar vegetation management contract with another farm. “We were a little skeptical of it at first. But the sheep really liked it – it’s such a good environment for a sheep because they have shade at all times,” says Fox. “They love being in the panels.”

Kochendoerfer points out that it’s the vegetation beneath the panels that gets cleared first, “because that’s where they eat during the day.

When it gets really hot, they stay in the shade and just move back and forth underneath the panels,” she explains. “In the early morning or later in the evening, they graze the areas between the rows of panels, or around the outside edges of the site.” building a business

When the couple decided to move back to Fox’s home state, they knew sheep would be in their future, but didn’t necessarily know if solar grazing would be a viable business model. They started small, creating grazing plans for a few solar sites.

Their flock of sheep (all Katahdins, which don’t require shearing and provide good meat) grew, as did the number of solar installations in the state.

Eventually, Agrivoltaic Solutions was born and they became more and more involved with grazing solar sites. “It’s something we sort of fell into, and then worked hard to make it a business,” Fox says.

The couple currently has a flock of about 450 sheep (and also two young children). “In the fall, all of the sheep get moved off the solar sites and come back to the barn with us. We breed them in September and then lamb in February,” says Fox. Last year, about 400 lambs were born, averaging about 1.5 lambs per ewe. The grazing crew is all female, so they pick their replacements from the lambs. The rest are sold to other farms or at auction.

Agrivoltaic currently works with nine different stor ie s f r om & f or t h e l an d

Agrivoltaic Solutions is a family affair: Niko Kochendoerfer and Lewis Fox, with their two young children. solar developers on 47 different sites, not only in Vermont but also a few in New York and Maine.

That accounts for just over 900 acres, with the average site being about 20 acres. The number of sheep required depends on the quality of the vegetation, but the couple figures on having 2 to 3.5 sheep per acre. On farther-from-home sites, they work with subcontractor sheep farms. Fox says that because the company has developed expertise working with solar installations, and carries the high-dollar insurance policy required to sign the solar site contracts, it’s often easier for sheep farms to let Agrivoltaic arrange the contracts, so those farmers can focus on the sheep.

“Our role is kind of making it turnkey for them to just put the sheep on the site and manage it,” says Fox, noting that it’s been rewarding to see other sheep farmers come into solar grazing. a perfect match

While Fox and Kochendoerfer are first and foremost sheep farmers, Agrivoltaic is in the vegetation management business. “We graze the solar sites;

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other people mow them. In Vermont, mowing typically takes place two times a year,” explains Fox. He says that from the solar developer’s perspective, the cost per acre for grazing and mowing is about the same. But there are some advantages to having sheep on the site.

For starters, keeping the land in agricultural use is often helpful from a permitting perspective.

“It’s a very hot issue right now. A big thing that solar developers run up against are concerns about developing on farmland, which are totally fair,” says Fox. “So I think being able to kind of marry the two is very beneficial for them – that’s where a lot of the interest in grazing comes from.”

Plus, he adds, from a vegetation management perspective, sheep do a really good job, especially around the solar panel posts and the fence lines.

“They’re sized right, so they can get into tight spots where otherwise you’d be string trimming or spraying herbicide. And because of their size, they don’t beat stuff up; there’s very low risk of damage to the solar equipment.” Also, sheep can work easily on steeply sloping solar sites, which might be a challenge to mow safely.

The sheep are efficient, but there are some things they won’t eat. For example, they don’t like sedges (“or really stemmy stuff, or thistles,” adds Fox), so Agrivoltaics will sometimes mow areas of

wet or weedy sites to supplement what the sheep have done. Again, the company’s overall mission is good vegetation management.

But they also work hard to make the sites as healthy and sheep-friendly as possible, so that the sheep can do the vast majority of the work. That means creating detailed pasture management plans for the solar installations, just as farmers would on their own property. Here, again, their agricultural background comes in handy. In Germany, Kochendoerfer managed a 3,000-sheep grazing operation with both flock and ecosystem health in mind.

Typically, the sheep graze the solar sites from May to October. “Usually we’ll rotate a group of sheep between different sites. This group here, for example,” says Fox, pointing to a flock grazing at the Open View Farm solar site in New Haven, “started the season in Sudbury, then they moved down to Wallingford, then back to Sudbury, and now they’re up here in New Haven.” The sheep are moved when they’ve sufficiently cleared a site; on some sites, especially newly built ones where the vegetation is just getting established, they’re careful not to overgraze and stunt the growth.

“We treat the pasture in a way that it needs to be treated,” emphasizes Kochendoerfer.

The sheep run on grass, which certainly beats

The solar panels provide shade on hot days, and the sheep are just the right size for grazing under and around them.

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having to regularly fuel up a fleet of mowers and trimmers. Fox and Kochendoerfer, along with one employee, make regular check-in visits (two to three times per week), trucking in water for the sheep in the process. But otherwise maintenance is relatively low.

In addition to the shade that solar panels provide, the sites are well suited to sheep because they are all fenced for safety under the federal energy code. “That’s as important as the shade, because it keeps the sheep in and it keeps predators out. We have very, very few incidences of predators on solar sites,” says Fox. When first moving onto a particular site, they walk the perimeter to be sure there aren’t any places where, for example, erosion has left a gap under a fence that a coyote or some other predator might use for access. In those instances, they’ll add a small section of temporary pasture fencing. f u ture opportunities

Asked what she likes about working with sheep, Kochendoerfer replies “Everything. They just make a lot of sense. They’re very happy with marginal land. They’re happy with native vegetation.

They integrate well. I like the way they eat…how stor ie s f r om & f or t h e l an d

The sheep travel between solar sites grazing during the growing season, and then return “home” for the winter. they’re selective grazers. They like the grasses more than, for example, the herbs, so you always have diversity moving into sheep pastures, which is good for pollinators, which is good for wildlife. And at the same time, they’re not as heavy as cows, so they compact without tearing the sod apart, which is good for the soil.”

Solar grazing with sheep is good for farmers, too, adds Fox: “I think there are tremendous opportunities for farmers; solar really is what makes it possible for us to be working with sheep.”

The Solar Grazing Association (of which Kochendoerfer and Fox are founding members) estimates that there are more than 100,000 acres of solar being grazed in the US right now. “It’s just been exploding in the last few years,” says Fox. And he hopes that means more opportunities for sheep farmers in Vermont. “There’s a lot more sites in the pipeline; I look forward to seeing more people in Vermont get involved in this. I think there’s a lot of opportunities there; a sheep farmer can realistically double their income from a flock of sheep by adding some solar grazing.” —Patrick White

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The Promise of a Rare Sheep Breed

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n early 2022, Mark Rodgers, who owns MKVT Farm in Glover with his wife, Karen, was scrolling through Facebook when he saw a photo of a sheep that changed the course of their farm.

“Nothing sells quicker than a black and white sheep skin,” Rodgers thought to himself when he saw the image of a rare Dutch spotted sheep.

“I sent a message to the person – they were in Northern Ireland – asking, ‘Are there any of these in the United States?’ When he said, ‘No,’ I replied, ‘Well, I want one,’ and he said, ‘You can’t get one.’”

At that time, there had been a USDA ban in place for more than 20 years against the importation of animals from Europe due to the potential transmission of livestock diseases. But that was about to change. “We still can’t get live animals from Europe, but we can now import semen and embryos,” Rodgers explained.

Rodgers, a meat and fiber farmer with hundreds of animals, did more research about Dutch spotted sheep and was so encouraged by their potential that he became president of the newly formed Dutch Spotted Sheep Society of the US. The group formed just as importation restrictions were lifted, and so began his mission to be the first to bring the breed to this country.

“I had 30-something years of experience with embryo work in dairy cattle, and it’s a very similar practice with sheep, but I was nervous because it was the first time this animal had ever been imported,” Rodgers said.

In 2023, U.K. breeders began producing embryos for shipment to the US, and Rodgers ordered eight that fall. He received the frozen shipment in December at a trusted veterinarian’s certified import and storage facility in St. Albans, Maine, a requirement of imported goods. Then, he transported his eight recipient ewes and embryos to Tufts University’s Vet Field Services facility in Connecticut. Tufts’ veterinarians are known for their expertise in animal reproduction, and Rodgers knew working with them would increase the chance of success. The trip was certainly memorable.

“It was during a late-season hurricane. Roads were closed due to flooding, and the vet office’s water pump went out; but we successfully implanted eight ewes, and we had phenomenal results with seven pregnancies,” Rodgers recalled.

The ewes returned to Glover to give birth in May 2024. Shortly after the lambs were born, Rodgers witnessed the second reason Dutch spotted sheep are so coveted: their impressive size. “At four months old, the first ram was bigger than my seven-month-old sheep, and my sheep are sired by Texels, noted for their good size,” Rodgers said.

The benefits of this larger size? More sustainable agriculture in Vermont and nationally, he said: “If we can raise the yield, say, 10 percent, or shorten the amount of time from birth to slaughter by a month, we can improve the productivity of the land through a more efficient conversion of grasses and forages and natural growth into human foodstuffs.”

Rodgers predicts that sheep farmers who breed with Dutch spotted sheep can increase their meat output by five to six pounds per lamb, per year. As small dairy farms continue to decline in the state, Rodgers sees an opportunity.

“Small ruminants are a viable solution to maintain the use of the agricultural land and to provide income in the agricultural economy,” Rodgers said.

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Vermont, primarily used for wool production.

They were introduced by the foresight of a single person – William Jarvis, a US diplomat to Portugal who saw the value in bringing Merino sheep from that country to Vermont. Ultimately, competition from farmers in the West who could operate on cheaper margins shuttered the industry. Now, a shift back to sheep is happening as new markets and opportunities emerge.

“More and more land is not being used… big farms don’t want smaller lots, so there is an opportunity for small farms,” Rodgers said.

“There’s also a growing market for sheep, lamb, and natural products, including the fleece, the fiber, the skins, and the meat. Particularly in Vermont, with the influx of folks who are emigrating from other counties and have a diet higher in sheep or goat,” Rodgers said.

A lack of consistent wool supply has also been an obstacle for local Vermont companies like Johnson Woolen Mills, a problem that could be solved, Rodgers believes, with more wellmanaged sheep herds.

Rodgers will focus on boosting the industry by creating a breeding program. In 2024, he sent one of his Dutch spotted sheep rams on a

tour of the US to farms that wanted to lease the ram to breed their sheep. At the same time, he is growing his herd by importing larger numbers of embryos from Holland and Belgium to improve the genetic diversity of the US herd. He recently ordered 100 Dutch spotted sheep embryos and will become a certified import and storage facility so he can receive semen and embryos directly.

“We’ll be facilitating distribution around the country to anyone that is interested,” Rodgers said.

A modern-day William Jarvis, Rodgers is confident that Dutch spotted sheep can contribute to the rise of sheep farming again.

He’s honest about the challenges, like the delicate immune system of sheep and the shortage of butchers willing to take up space in their facilities for lambs. Still, like most Vermont farmers, he’s determined to find solutions, and hopes that farmers who may have managed large animals consider smaller ruminants.

“If you are a good manager of animals, you can manage any animal,” Rodgers said. “I’ve always said that, as a farmer, it’s my job to convert photosynthesis into protein.” Dutch spotted sheep, he noted, seem to be remarkably well suited to help farmers do that. —Laura Hardie

The first Dutch spotted sheep born in North America graze at MKVT Farm in Glover. stor ie s f r om & f or t h e l an d

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Pruning with Barb

hen we moved into the old brown and green house on Eagle Ledge Road in 2022, the yard was overgrown, a tangle of clematis vines, blackberry and raspberry bushes, and burdock and dock plant taller than me. The house’s previous owners – Barb and Don – had lived there for forty years before we moved in. They gardened and took care of the yard and surrounding woods for most of that time, but in the last ten years or so, guessing by what we found outside, health and age kept them indoors.

So up grew a jungle of alders and willows, and the gardens, shrubs, trees, and perennials they had cared for on an acre or so right around the house disappeared. We knew some of it was still there from what Barb told us, but we had no idea the extent of what we’d find.

First, we had to gather implements of destruction: clippers, loppers, lots of gardening gloves, a good weed whacker, a pole saw (left by Barb for us), and a scythe. Then, I had to get up close with it all. I found that hands and knees was the best strategy, going plant by plant, stem by stem, slowly figuring out what was what, and prioritizing what to keep and what to thin out. I used various field guides, asked naturalists and gardeners I know for help, and tried to make sense of the mayhem. I uncovered and kept a row of meadowsweet – and wondered if Barb knew how great it was for caterpillars and the birds that feed on them. I found and made space for daylilies, allowing them to see the sun all along the walkway connecting the back and front yards – where, I’m guessing, Barb had planted them decades ago. I pulled yard after yard 201

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of clematis vines off old apple and crabapple trees, quite sure I could hear the trees breathing “thank you!” as I worked. I opened up a hillside of Joe Pye weed, goldenrod, Queen Anne’s lace, asters, and black-eyed Susans. The only other time I’d felt this close to the natural world was falling over while portaging a canoe through a Canadian bog, deciding to give into the muck, sinking down and just letting the mud, bog water, and bugs seep in.

Until buying this old house, we had rented. I hadn’t realized that rural Vermont home ownership would be quite this physical, at least not outside of wood-stacking season. I also hadn’t realized that owning an old home, with a hundred years of homeowners before us, would bring with it this depth of emotional connection, or that I’d find that connection in bulbs and apple tree branches as much as in worn floorboards. But along that wildflower hillside in spring, deep inside the alders, Barb joined me – not in person, of course, but in the marks left by her loppers. There are so many decisions to make in this work: which alder should I cut back? Should I take out or leave this willow?

Hold on, is this a lilac bush? Do I want a tree here? Just as I’d finally decide to put my loppers to use and get myself into position in the mud and bugs and leaves, I’d see it: Barb’s cut, from ten or twenty years earlier, right next to the spot where I was aiming my own loppers. It happened over and over again, down where plant met dirt. There, again, was Barb. Prune by prune, as I followed her around the property, I gained her blessing to shape the yard and garden, to take over her care for this spot on Eagle Ledge Road into the future, to fine tune the balance between wild and tame, between old and new.

Just two years in now, my efforts have revealed the very best of an old rural homestead: five pear trees, five lilac bushes, two enormous ivory silk lilac trees, a giant forsythia, more varieties of daylilies than I knew existed, daffodils all over the yard and deep into the back woods, primroses and ferns in the shady spots. Almost magically, wildflowers appear in spring: trillium along the stream edge, trout lily under the backyard maple, and a huge patch of bloodroot, discovered when we pruned back a decade’s worth of dead branches from the lower reaches of the cedar hedge. And then there’s the enormous hosta that I had to fight my way to; the thing is so big it looks like it was around in the Cretaceous and fed dinosaurs. I found a rose quartz crystal nestled at the bottom of the hosta. Not quite my style, Barb, but from the size of the hosta I’d say it was doing its job. I tucked it back into place, hoping it would have some good energy to spare for the new bleeding heart I planted in the hosta’s shade.

As I head into our third spring here, I know that I’m far from done. The pruning has really only just begun. I’ve got the rest of the wildflower hill to resurrect, a flowering quince that isn’t flowering (maybe it misses Barb?), wild roses to wrangle by the door and mailbox, and the almost untouched backyard to figure out and open up. But now I know I have company, that I can watch for Barb’s pruning marks and follow her vision even as I create my own. I’m looking forward to welcoming spring to Eagle Ledge Road like this, loppers in hand, Barb at my side, for many years to come. What a gift it would be to grow old in this house, like Barb and Don, surrounded by apple trees and meadowsweet, gone from pruned to wild, to pruned, and back to wild again. —Naomi Heindel stor ie s f r om & f or t h e l an d

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More Warmth

une was another warm month, and looking back, what sticks out most was a memorable heat wave mid-month, when temperatures soared into the 90s in most of the state. Perhaps the most impressive number was the 80-degree minimum temperature that occurred in Burlington on the 19th – that’s tied

HARLOW FARM STAND

Early-season warmth meant the corn was already nearly knee-high (and waist-high for some) on June 2 in Harlow Farm Stand’s fields in Westminster.

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for the warmest low temperature of any month in Burlington’s history. In all, 18 days in June hit at least 80 degrees in the Queen City.

A line of strong storms hit north-central Vermont following that heat, which caused some flash flooding and triggered memories of last summer’s wet weather. “It’s a bit scary at this point how often we have to put Humpty Dumpty back together again,” said Harry Shephard, Stowe’s director of public works, in an interview that ran on WPTZ. “I’ve been Stowe’s public works director for 14 years, and this is the seventh event that would exceed a 100-year storm.” This was foreshadowing of what was to come in other parts of central and northeastern Vermont in July.

Precipitation was hit and miss throughout the month, but the general trend was that northern Vermont got a lot of rain and southern Vermont got a little. Monthly rainfall totals of 6 to 7 inches were common north of Interstate 89, which is a lot. Yet, parts of southern Vermont saw less than 2 inches. By the end of the month, the US Drought Monitor was listing parts of south-central and southeastern Vermont as “abnormally dry.”

June’s the month where the agricultural growing season in Vermont starts to really take off, and in the parts of the state that missed the extreme rain, it was a productive month. Farms around the state were reporting early crops of just about everything. We heard brassicas were rocking this year; one farm in Westminster reported being on track for sweet corn on the Fourth of July. On the negative side, we heard of troubles from strawberry growers, whose season collapsed early due to the extreme heat.

After a month of weather that felt like midsummer, spring made a brief return on the last weekend of the month. On the morning of the 28th, lows were in the 30s in the colder mountain hollows. A cool, rainy weekend with highs in the v e r mon t al m anac | vol u m e v

CRAIG ARNOLD

Unsettled skies over Townshend on June 24, 2024.

60s followed. Scarves of smoke came from some chimneys as people looked to take off the chill and dampness. This was the Vermont many of us remember, when it wasn’t uncommon to have an occasional light fire in the summer months. The weekend ended with a stormfront that brought

95-mile-an-hour straight-line winds and tornado warnings to much of the Northeast, so that part was thoroughly modern.

When things were said and done, the average temperature for the month came in at 4 degrees above the 20th century mean.

We looked back at our weather summaries from the past four volumes of the Vermont Almanac and saw that June 2023 was a bifurcated month – half wet and half dry – that was notable for the Canadian wildf ire smoke that blanketed the region. June 2022 was blissful; June 2021 was hot and dry; June 2020 was half cooler-than-normal then half hotter-than-normal. stor ie s f r om & f or t h e l an d

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e Luna Moth Tails

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LUCIAN FLOREA / CC

he huge lime-green wings of a luna moth are gorgeous, but it’s those long thin tails on the hindwings, with little twists at the ends, that add such an elegant touch. What looks like elegance to us turns out to be life-saving to the moth, because it’s the twists themselves that protect the moths from bats by disrupting the sonar signals that bats use to zero in on their prey. This idea was first put forward over a hundred years ago and recent experiments using high-speed infrared videography show that lunas whose wing tails have been removed are almost nine times more likely to be nabbed by bats than moths whose tails are intact. historical records suggest

CRAIG HUNT

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that black gray squirrels (Sciurus carolinensis) were more common in the 19th century, but the genetic color phase is now rare in most places. Why? One hypothesis is that hunters had an easier time seeing black squirrels, and so natural selection favored the grays.

Today, black gray squirrels tend to be more common in urban areas, and one idea for why this might be is that gray squirrels are harder for drivers to see against gray asphalt, and so maybe natural selection is favoring the blacks.

Check out the squirrel mapper project (squirrelmapper.org), where tens of thousands of citizen scientists are generating data that’s helping to map black-morph populations. v e r mon t al m anac | vol u m e v

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A Big Pine Pollen Year

t takes only trace amounts of some tree pollens for seasonal allergy sufferers to start suffering. Fortunately, eastern white pine pollen is not considered to be an especially potent allergen – because when white pine pollen comes, there is nothing trace about it. These towering giants of Vermont forests produce billowing pollen clouds that can look like heavy fog or small forest fires in the distance. But due to the large size of its grains and the relatively low levels of proteins present, allergies to pine pollen aren’t common. So you can blame white pine for that thick yellow powder coating on your car hood in early June, but it’s probably not responsible for your sneezing and itching eyes.

TEAGAN MANCE

in most green frogs ,

yellow and blue skin pigments stack on top of each other to create the green color we associate with frogs. Very occasionally, a green frog is missing the yellow pigments and appears blue.

tree leaves that grow

A white pine pollen storm in Middlesex, June 6, 2024. stor ie s f r om & f or t h e l an d

from stump sprouts are often oversized. It seems that the extensive root system beneath the stump is able to provide more than enough water and nutrients for the relatively small number of new leaves.

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nyone with a young kid and a flower garden is a sucker for flower recipes, and they abound online, usually accompanied by stunning photos. And yet the superlatives in these recipes are often so superficial that one wonders if they were written by a real person.

Does peony jelly really have a “delicious peony taste,” as one recipe proclaimed? We were skeptical. And so we decided to hold a jelly-off, where we’d compare peony jelly to Johnny jump-up jelly.

Step one was to collect five cups’ worth of flowers from each species. The peony petals came from the Sarah Bernhardt cultivar, chosen for their deep pink. The big ones were shell shaped; the little ones looked like pink feathers.

It would have been too tedious to collect Johnny jump-up petals, so we picked whole flower heads.

We washed the flowers, then covered them in boiling water at a ratio of one cup of flowers to one cup of water. Right away, the two batches seemed different. The peony petals mostly smelled like nothing.

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overnight, then strained them, reserving 3.5 cups of liquid from each batch. We brought the infused liquid to a boil, then added one package of Sure-Jell pectin and the juice from one lemon into each batch. We boiled it rapidly for about a minute, stirring frequently. We then added 3 cups of sugar to each batch and, stirring constantly, let it boil for three minutes. Afterwards, we skimmed the foam and ladled into canning jars. Each batch made about seven half-pints.

The jellies were both a lovely color: pink and purple, just

like their respective flowers.

And it turns out they do taste slightly different. The jumpup has a taste that’s redolent of its smell – it’s unusual.

My seven-year-old liked it best, though to be fair I think she was swayed more by the purple color than the taste. The peony jelly developed a flavor that was more traditionally pleasing. It was balanced and the lemon came through better to give it some sour notes. I want to describe it as vaguely cranberry-flavored, which shows that I’m being swayed by the color, too. —Dave Mance III v e r mon t al m anac | vol u m e v

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Ash Action

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with leaf-out and the transpiration process that carries the pesticide throughout the tree’s living tissue. I treated three mature trees with a total of a half-liter of pesticide, so my recurring cost works out to $225 every other year, forever.

And to what end? Treatments for the rest of my life, and then the trees die anyway? Maybe it’s only sentimentality, and when my kids are grown up and the tree swing comes down, I’ll let the ash borer complete its course. Or it could be hope that our protected trees will contribute to the biodiversity of a future forest once a more permanent solution is discovered. Those reasons seem plausible, but they’re propped up by another adopted-Vermont value that suits me: stubbornness. We can’t save the whole forest (and all that insecticide would be bad for the woodpeckers), but I think these trees are important. I don’t like that shiny beetle wrecking them. I plan to keep these few ashes. I’ll do it as long as I can. —Joe Ringenberg

JOE RINGENBERG

e knew it was only a matter of time before the emerald ash borer would arrive in Vermont and decimate our ash trees. I preemptively removed a few trees close to the house, anticipating the extra risk that would come with cutting insect-damaged trees, which can come down unpredictably. Still, news in September 2023 that the ash borer had been found at Billings Farm in nearby Woodstock came as a surprise. I thought we had more time.

With a new sense of urgency, I asked an arborist what it would take to protect our most prized trees – two ashes that shade the yard, a third from which hangs a very good rope swing. There are a few different chemical treatments available, and the most effective, emamectin benzoate, would cost $1,250 every other year for my three trees.

Multiplied by the expected life of the trees (or the homeowner), that could really add up.

I’m not a native Vermonter, but I am thrifty and resourceful, at least enough to blend in. I figured I might do it myself, bringing the cost down to budget while adding ash-care to the chores that make up Vermont housekeeping. The first thing I learned is that it is illegal to purchase or apply a Class A pesticide in Vermont without a state license. The exam is administered by the Vermont Agency of Agriculture at a handful of locations around the state, at a cost of $25. The test covers about 300 pages of material, at a rate of a gallon of technical terminology per acre of common sense.

The main resource, the Northeast Core Manual, captures the key lesson in bold letters on its spine: Use pesticides safely: READ THE LABEL. A pesticide label is a legal document, regulated by government agencies and recognized by courts.

Even the naming conventions are regulated and information-rich; the formulation I bought is named TreeAgeG4 and a gallon (G) contains four percent (4) active ingredient. It costs $450 per liter. Add to that the exam fee (passed!), the test materials, and $150 for a reusable set of Chemjet tree injectors (spring-loaded plastic plungers), and my total cost was $675. I made my first treatment in early June of 2024, timed to coincide

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Focusing on the Soil

dave chapman is leading the fight over the real meaning of “ organic ”

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ong Wind Real Organic tomatoes are available in many stores throughout the Northeast, in food co-ops from the Hanover / Lebanon / White River group all the way to Brattleboro and Concord, as well as in chain supermarkets like Shaw’s and Hannaford.

Dave Chapman, who started it all, never intended to focus on intensive tomato culture. In the late 1970s, he began growing vegetables with a pair of oxen on one acre beside Route 113 in Thetford. He drew on a year of experience working with celebrated organic farmer Jake Guest of Killdeer Farm in Norwich and sold his produce at a roadside stand and the newly founded Norwich Farmers Market. After a couple of years, he was able to buy the back field at Long Wind Farm’s present location in East Thetford and, eventually, the front field, too. The oxen gave way to a small tractor, and at his peak Chapman was cultivating five acres of vegetables and flowers.

The arrival of children changed all that. In his first year of being a parent, the farm income plummeted. He had been growing 100 different varieties of vegetables at the price of 60- to 70hour work weeks. Maintaining that pace was just not compatible with being part of his childrens’ lives. Chapman realized that he needed to streamline his growing operation. Luckily, he was already successfully growing tomatoes in heated plastic hoop-houses. In fact, people lined up for his tomatoes at the start of the season. So he made the transition to growing only tomatoes, to the great disappointment of many customers for whom Long Wind Farm had become their go-to for a whole range of organic produce.

Chapman made the switch from plastic to glass greenhouses. But he kept growing tomatoes in soil, unlike his European (and later US) counterparts who transitioned to growing greenhouse tomatoes year-round using hydroponic methods. He learned everything he could, which included a visit to observe first-hand the methods of Dutch tomato growers, whose greenhouse techniques were the most sophisticated in the world at the time.

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He also received advice from Eliot Coleman, the preeminent researcher, author, educator, and organic farming pioneer who soon became a friend.

From Coleman he absorbed organic methods for maintaining soil health, which requires not only organic matter but also a diverse and teeming microbial population. In soil rich in organic matter, roots and microbes soak up rainwater, resist runoff, prevent erosion and incorporate carbon. Soils depleted of organic matter and microbes perform those functions poorly.

From the start, Chapman aspired to farm in a way that’s best for the health of all parties involved – the soil, the surrounding environment, the farm workers, and the consumers. He has always eschewed synthetic fertilizers and pesticides, adhering instead to organic farming techniques that had become a movement in the 1970s. In the 1980s, organic farming achieved national recognition in the US. In 1990, Congress adopted the Organic Food Production Act, which charged the Secretary of Agriculture with establishing a list of allowed and prohibited substances. It took more than a decade for the USDA (US Department of Agriculture) to implement the National Organic Standards in 2002.

While this seemed like a milestone at the time, Chapman and others in the organic movement were opposed to federal involvement. It was clear v e r mon t al m anac | vol u m e v

LI SHEN

Dave Chapman inspects a tomato plant at Long Wind Farm. stor ie s f r om & f or t h e l an d

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to them that the USDA resented the division of farming into organic and conventional practice.

Soon, pressure to soften the regulations came from powerful corporations that manufacture fertilizers and pesticides, as well as from industrial agribusiness, large distributors, and retailers. Big money is made in exporting all the components of conventional, chemical agriculture to the rest of the world. Organic threatened to upset the applecart as farmers and consumers worldwide pushed for governmental organic standards.

Big chemical corporations like Syngenta and Bayer-Monsanto went on the offensive, publishing articles asserting that the whole world would starve if we were to rely on organic farming and questioning whether organic food was any safer or more nutritious. They hired professional marketers to sow confusion about the meaning of organic by using terms like “biological” and “natural” to label conventionally produced foods.

Over the next decade it became clear that the standards were not being defended and the courts proved reluctant to challenge a federal agency.

One short-lived victory came when a court upheld the ban on synthetic chemicals in organic farming. Four months later, Congress changed the Organic Food Act to allow them. It became clear to Chapman and others that the USDA, under corporate pressure for access to the lucrative

organic market, was going to stretch the organic label to include industrial farming techniques, so long as the inputs could be defined as “organic.”

In Chapman’s words: “I didn’t realize the extent of the hydroponic invasion of organic. But as I got into it, I started to go to these meetings of the National Organic Standards Board to petition them to please get it together. The National Organic Standards Board had recommended years before that hydroponic not be certified as organic. I met a whole community, and realized that people had been working on this for years.

I had not; I’d just been farming while they’d been trying to fight the loss of integrity that was getting greater and greater – not just around hydroponics, but also around concentrated animal feeding operations, the confinement of livestock for dairy and meat and eggs, and also around fraud, in particular labeling of dubious imported grain inputs as organic, and around the failure to actually enforce the (organic) rules for dairy.”

Indeed, in 2017, the USDA “re-interpreted” the Organic Food Production Act and stated that “hydroponic, aquaponic, and aeroponic operations have always been eligible for organic certification.” This was in stark contrast to its earlier position that “An organic plan shall contain provisions designed to foster soil fertility, primarily through the management of organic

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The glass greenhouses at Long Wind Farm.

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content of the soil through proper tillage, crop rotation, and manuring.” This dealt a blow to the livelihood and morale of organic farmers who now had to compete with industrial hydroponic producers, as well as confusing the public and undermining their faith in the organic label.

Today, almost all commercial tomato greenhouses – conventional and organic – use hydroponics, accounting for 30 percent of all fresh tomatoes sold in the US. Chapman’s Long Wind Farm is an oddity for growing in soil. He is frustrated that the USDA allows hydroponic tomatoes to be labeled “organic,” stressing that the complexity of a living, organically farmed soil cannot be duplicated in a hydroponic cocktail, even if it contains natural supplements like compost tea. Nor do hydroponics build soil health, which is the crux of the organic method. For instance, when plants grow in soil, about 25 percent of their photosynthetic production is put into root exudates that are a complex blend of plant metabolites, including sugars, amino acids, lipids, flavonoids, terpenes, enzymes, and hormones. There’s a reason plants put so much of their resources into this: the exudates nourish soil microbes that, in exchange, provide critical minerals, defense compounds, and micronutrients to the plant. Root exudates also aerate soil by improving soil crumb structure, literally gluing soil particles together. Chapman asserts that this complexity contributes not only to soil and plant health but also to the health of those who eat the plants and, significantly, to flavor. He uses liberal amounts of compost to feed both plants and microbes. The beds are tilled once a year to aerate them and redistribute organic matter.

Otherwise it’s up to the roots and the microbes.

Two weeks after a legal challenge to the organic labeling of hydroponic was defeated, Chapman and several of the original pioneers in the organic movement met at the Vermont headquarters of the Northeast Organic Farmers Association (NOFA) in Richmond. About 30 farmers attended and swore they were not going to let the organic label become meaningless. This was the birth of the Real Organic Project. Launched in 2018, its purpose is to uphold the genuine organic principles abandoned by the USDA. Chapman became the group’s co-director, along with Linley Dixon.

Dave Chapman believes that building healthy soil is the first step to growing healthy plants, and healthy people.

In a nutshell, since the weakening of the USDA organic standards, a flood of so-called organic food from hydroponic farms and concentrated animal feeding operations (which supply over 90 percent of all meat and dairy in the US) began competing with true organic farmers under a different definition of the term organic. Many true organic farmers are being driven out of business. In an effort to distinguish true organic growers from their “USDA organic” counterparts, the Real Organic Project employs 8 to 10 agricultural professionals who recruit and inspect organic farms to certify their adherence to original organic standards. This allows them to use the Real Organic label. There is no charge for this service, as Chapman recognizes that farmers often can’t afford added fees. The Real Organic Project is funded solely by donations and has certified over 1,000 farms so far. To spread the message and expand the network further, he spends a significant amount of time interviewing farmers, chefs, and activists for weekly podcasts that are viewable on the Real Organic Project website.

Chapman aspires to have integrity in the marketplace, with an organic designation that tells consumers about more than just what inputs were used in production. “If consumers are given an honest choice and know this is Real Organic, whereas the other is hydro-USDAorganic, I think the Real Organic is going to do just fine. There’s not a big movement saying we want hydroponic food. Just like, there’s not a big movement saying we want our milk to come from confinement operations.” —Li Shen

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A permanent bed system reduces the need for cultivation and improves soil health.

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The Nuances of Reduced-Till Farming

hose of us who continue farming are going to have more challenging seasons,” said Evan Perkins of Small Axe Farm during the 2024 winter meeting of the Jack Lazor Memorial Soil Health Stewards cohort.

“2023 will probably be looked back upon as a good year in a few decades,” he said, reflecting on a growing season that brought record-breaking levels of precipitation and widespread flooding to Vermont.

Perkins cautioned against the mindset that we just have to get through this one hard year, and warned that longer-term planning is imperative.

One of the key tenets of longer-term planning involves soil health. During this meeting, farmers shared reflections on their tillage practices, some of which helped farms survive the unprecedented rainfall. A recurring theme was that flexibility is essential, since one challenge that comes with climate change is that we can’t predict what is next: too hot, too dry, late freeze, high winds, flooding, smoke.

The concept of “no-till” has been the focus of many discussions in recent years, but it is critical to understand that there is not one right way to promote soil health. Having a diverse toolbox 213

of options is key. “Our goal, as farmers and land stewards, is not to grow vegetables without doing any tillage. Our goal is to grow food for our community in a way that improves the productive potential of this land, without imposing harm onto our local, regional, and global ecosystem,” Ryan Fitzbeauchamp from Evening Song Farm in Shrewsbury recently shared. “In general, our farm is doing less tillage than we used to in order to meet that goal. And, also, certain forms of tillage, in certain contexts, can help us improve the long-term productive potential of this land.

While it’s true that excessive tillage can rapidly diminish the health of the soil, it’s also true that skillful use of tillage can be used together with other soil care practices to increase the long-term fertility of the soil.”

Farms across Vermont are employing a variety of practices to improve soil health. Although each of the following examples involve farms that are smaller scale – five acres or less – many of these approaches are scalable and are also being employed on larger farms. There’s insight here that can be applied to a backyard garden, as well.

—Megan Browning and Rebecca Maden v e r mon t al m anac | vol u m e v

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e use a permanent bed approach for the majority of the crops we cultivate, so that we don’t have to till or disturb the soil with any equipment other than our hands, garden rakes, and a digging fork for crops like carrots. This leaves beneficial fungi undisturbed, and lets us farm while focusing on growing soil organic matter and improving overall soil health. We layer fertility on top of the bed, and our goal is to never leave garden soil bare. We grow lots of cover

crops with this system too. We let them winter kill, or, if the cover crop grows through the spring, we terminate it with a method called “crimping.”

[This means you bend over a tall cover crop (typically winter rye) right before it starts to flower, snapping the stem at its base and terminating growth.

This method leaves a hearty layer of cover crop on the soil, which should block weed germination, maintain soil moisture, and build soil organic matter in the longer term.]

After we crimp the cover crop,

we often use solarizing tarps as insurance that the cover crops die and to kill any small annual weeds. We started our permanent beds by using lots of compost, but have turned more and more to using mulches for fertility. One of our favorite is weed-free straw.

It is easy to use and provides great winter cover for beds.

We are leaving the garden completely covered with mulch over the winter in case of heavy rains. We can no longer rely on winter snow cover to protect our soil.—Patrick Sullivan

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Weed-free straw mulch adds fertility and protects soil against winter wash-outs. stor ie s f r om & f or t h e l an d

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e are using a mustard cover crop mid-summer in our high tunnels that are used for intensive lettuce production as a way to add organic matter and for soil biofumigation.

[The mustard cover crop contains glucosinulates, which are compounds that can eliminate soil-borne pathogens and weeds when methodically cropped and incorporated.] After two seasons I have definitely seen reduced disease pressure in the tunnels, which I attribute partially to this practice.

Another thing we have been working on in the last couple of years is bringing more land into production so that we can incorporate longer rotations between intensive vegetable cropping. I would like to see

OLD ROAD FARM

Mustard cover crop has helped reduce disease pressure in high tunnels used for intensive lettuce production.

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anywhere from one-third to one-half of our cropland in a full-season cover crop on any given year to increase organic matter on our sandy soil and help manage weed pressure.

We use tarping as part of our rotation for certain shortseason crops, like arugula and spinach, that we seed every week. After preparing beds with tillage in the spring and

seeding our first rounds of those crops, we experimented with tarping to terminate the crop after harvest and then seeding again into the existing bed. We had good results, and those beds held up better under the adverse conditions we had in 2023, with less soil crusting from the pounding rains, better germination, and less weed pressure. It doesn’t

work for every crop, but at our scale, it is a good tool to have.

We lightly rake the bed tops to incorporate amendments and remove pieces of debris that would interfere with the seeder. In a very wet year, it is much easier to find a dry window to prep beds this way than to wait to be able to bring the tractor into the field.

—Henry Webb

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e plant Dutch white clover and native grasses in strips between annually planted beds.

This creates habitat for pollinating insects and critters, while also helping to keep the soil cool, which creates a more enjoyable experience for the humans working in the field. The living root systems of the clover and native grasses support soil biology and also minimize overall soil disturbance – we’re not trying to maintain weed-free soil between beds. — Ansel Ploog

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Living strips between planted beds. stor ie s f r om & f or t h e l an d

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ince 2020, we have been transplanting crops directly into dead cover crop residue on our farm, without first incorporating that residue into the soil through tillage.

There are several advantages to this approach. The thick cover crop residue mulches the soil surface, which greatly reduces the risk of erosion, suppresses the growth of annual weeds, and conserves moisture in the soil

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for the following crop. The soil itself is also well structured from the undisturbed root system of the previous cover crop and the microbial community associated with those roots.

We consistently see our transplanted crops flourishing in the weeks after transplanting due to the well-structured soil. The mulched surface prevents soil from splashing on plant leaves and we see much less disease

in these crops compared to our previous methods of growing on bare soil. In some instances, transplanting through legume cover crop residue allows us to grow all of the fertility needed for good yields on the following crop. Experimenting with these systems to improve the fertility of our farm’s soil is one of the most energizing and rewarding parts of my work.

—Ryan Fitzbeauchamp

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Keep Going

he first wagon showed up on Sunday night, early evening. Something about hay weather, always hot. Bob has been providing hay since we started with our sheep. He’s one of those Vermonters who moves in a kindly way, gentle and true. He can grab bales two at a time and throw them anywhere he wants. When I was using a pickup truck to pick up bales, he would throw them from the barn loft 20 feet up and they’d end up stacked in the pickup bed without me having to adjust them much. He now brings full wagons to my house. The bales are tight, weighing between 35 and 40 pounds. Bob unhitched the wagon and headed back to his farm in Georgia. He wears a mask, so he doesn’t pick up any outside germs. He deals with family health challenges that are improving but have been life-threatening. I hear him say remission with a smile. He does so with love and optimism. I climb up on the hay wagon and start unloading hay. My fingers find the baling twine and squeeze under it to get a hold. I toss the first bale as far into the barn as I can, watching it slide across the cement. I grab some of the high bales and pull them down and others tumble behind in a small hay avalanche. The trick is to go into a trance of grabbing a bale, tossing, grabbing a bale, tossing. I get about 30 off the wagon and jump down and start stacking them in the barn. It’s early in the work, but my shirt is wet with sweat. I have music playing from my phone and each song provides a new rhythm for the unloading. I’m dancing on my own, and that’s okay. One row of hay across, and then another on top, go a third row and then start another on the floor. Build that up and then cross bales lengthwise to anchor in the first. Jump back on the hay wagon and grab those twines and pitch ’em and heave ’em hard.

The farther they slide, the less carrying. Bob will be wanting his wagon, needs his wagon, so I can’t stop. Loose hay is slippery on the barn floor, and I slide a bit.

Don’t fall, lots more hay to unload. I work one side of the wagon more and grab every bale. Light from the west shines on the barn as the sun goes down. My arms are spotted red from jabbing hay, like bee stings. It’s too hot for long sleeves, and I don’t feel it much, just grab each bale and throw it down. Jump down and stack.

Grab a ladder to climb so I can get the pile higher. I get a few bales way up top, sitting like watchmen, guarding the barn. The lighter bales I can toss higher, the heavier ones are taking their toll. Hay dust dulls my eyes a a bit, and, against the rules, I rub them from the side. I think of Bob and his family. Nothing I’m doing holds a candle to their journeys to Boston, back and forth for treatments week after week, month after month. Each of their trips is like tossing a thousand bales and stacking and tossing a thousand more. Leaving the open fields and driving into the city traffic. My shirt is soaked, and I toss it off. I get the wagon unloaded and climb back up with a broom to clean things up. Bob will grab the wagon later in the evening. He needs it for the morning. Back to the field, long rows of green like serpents across the field. The hay baler collecting, collecting, collecting and then – boom! – a bale flies into the wagon. One bale, two bales, three bales, and then over a hundred and more. Nothing comes easy. On Monday night, Bob arrives with the second wagon full. My body is tired, but I climb back up and start pitching hay off. One bale, two bales, three bales, then I lose count. The music

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plays in the barn, and my mind drifts off and I hardly know I’m tossing down bales. One side to the other, small avalanches and hay bales flying. Looks like 30 to go, and then 15, and then one more to throw. From the wagon I see the wood that sits waiting to be split and stacked. One thing at a time. A soft light from the setting sun soothes my aches. I grab the broom and sweep. Bob shepherds his family and brings us hay. We shepherd our sheep and bring them hay. Bales stacked and ready for winter. A yellow light from the barn illuminates the hay wagon like a dance floor. The music is playing, but I don’t have any dance left in me. Brush off the best I can and head into the house. The cool water from the shower feels good and hay collects in the tub. I fall into bed and don’t care where the covers are. For a few moments I hear the faucet in the shower dripping, one drop, two drops, three. The meditative rhythm is all I need. I’m grateful for the journey and the lessons. The Blue Moon Farm. The place where the sheep come to be fed. —Brad Ferland

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200-Year, 500-Year, 1,000-Year Floods

hen you average state temperatures in the NOAA database, 2024 was Vermont’s third-warmest July in 128 years. There was quite a bit of variability in the state, though. Parts of southern Vermont, as well as areas around Lake Champlain and in the Passumpsic basin, were hot, but only in a 1 to 3 degrees above normal way. The 5 to 7 degrees above normal heat stretched up the Route 7 and Interstate 91 corridors, as well as along the spine of the Green Mountains all the way up through the state. Lebanon, New Hampshire, which is a good proxy for White River Junction, had 12 consecutive days (between July 6 and 17) that reached at least 90 degrees. If you’re new to the state, know that this isn’t weather anyone expects in northern New England, even in the height of summer.

The heat probably would have dominated the news, if it wasn’t for the rain. That was variable, too.

Southern Vermont and parts of the Connecticut

River Valley were dry. There, people talked about this summer as one where there was just enough rain to keep things out of drought. Woodstock reported just 2.56 inches of rain for the month, nearly 1.5 inches below normal.

But in other parts of the state, drought conditions would have been welcomed. On July 10, exactly one year to the day from last summer’s epic storm, there was more extreme rain in the same areas of central Vermont that had flooded last July, and then again last December. Up to seven inches of rain fell. Roads were destroyed.

Downtown Barre flooded again. When it happened last summer, there was Hurricane-Irenerelated déjà vu, but 12 years had given people time to steel themselves. This anniversary storm felt more like a gut-punch. People carried on, but the carrying-on was grim and resigned. It seemed like what you might imagine the destruction caused by war feels like.

BRAM TOWBIN

Déjà vu: Major flooding hit central Vermont on July 10 for the second straight year; here, the cleanup in devastated Plainfield. Opposite page: The scene on July 30, 2024, at the intersection of Vermont Route 114 and Mount Hunger Road in East Burke, after an unimaginable 8-plus-inches of rain fell.

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VERMONT STATE POLICE

Two weeks later, a batch of thunderstorms formed in the lower Passumpsic valley and then didn’t move. In 6 hours, 8.41 inches of rain fell on St. Johnsbury, smashing the old daily rainfall record by more than 3 inches. Homes and infrastructure throughout the area, especially in Lyndonville, were destroyed in places that were not in floodplains. There were two reported fatalities. Eight inches of rain falling off a 40 x 70-foot roof translates into about 14,000 gallons of water. It’s mindboggling to think of that translated to on a county-wide basis.

When you read the reporting around each of these storms you’d often find the term “XX-year event,” which is understandable because it gives readers context. On July 10, 2024, the 7.2 inches that fell in 24 hours in Walden charts as a 200year event. Going back to 2023, the 9.2 inches of rain that fell over 48 hours in Calais charts as a 500-year event. The 8.4 inches of rain that fell in 6 hours in St. Johnsbury on July 30, 2024, broke the chart. It would have qualified as a 1,000-year event at only 5.5 inches, and there’s no category beyond 1,000 years. These numbers are generated

by NOAA’s Atlas 14 model, which is designed to inform civil engineering projects throughout the country. When a municipality is building a sewer system, or engineering a bridge or culvert, these data help them predict the future. The website declares: “NOAA precipitation frequency estimates serve as the de-facto standards for designing, building, and operating infrastructure to withstand the forces of heavy precipitation and floods.” You can play around with the model yourself by Googling NOAA’s National Weather Service PFDS and clicking through to Vermont.

There are several problems with thinking about storms this way. The first is that, from a semantics standpoint, the term 100-year-event leads people to believe that these things happen once every 100 years, which of course is wrong. Expressed mathematically, a 100-year event means there’s a 1 percent chance of that sort of event happening

in any given year. (A 1,000-year event would be a 0.1 percent chance.)

But the more substantial problem is that the Atlas 14 model, based in part on 20th-century weather records and last updated in 2015, seems off. NOAA is aware of that, and they’ve secured funding for an update that’s scheduled to be released in 2027. But a lot of infrastructure will be built before then, especially in light of all the flood repair work that’s being done just in Vermont now, not to mention the $1.2 trillion that’s being allocated nationwide through the 2021 Infrastructure Improvement and Jobs Act. Atlas 14 is just a tool – the ultimate decisions on sizing are up to cities and towns and states, and they’re not easy decisions. No one wants to be a prisoner of the moment and spend tax dollars overbuilding out of panic. At the same time, the data clearly show that the world is a meteorologically changed place. If we compare the amount of precipitation that has fallen on Vermont since the Almanac was founded 5 years ago, and compare that 5-year total to the 1901-2000 mean, we see an anomaly of 21.87 additional inches. We hope that the powers that be are taking this new reality into account as they size our infrastructure.

When all was said and done, St. Johnsbury got 17.73 inches of rain in July, which, not surprisingly, was also off the Atlas 14 chart. That much rainfall in a month would have been considered a 1,000year event at a mere 15.7 inches.

We looked back at our weather summaries from the past three volumes and saw that in July 2023 much of central Vermont was underwater. July 2022 was an average year; July 2021 was cool and wet; July 2020 was hot and dry. stor ie s f r om & f or t h e l an d

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Notes from the Flood-Ravaged North

n addition to writing, I also work for the Greensboro selectboard. In the July 10, 2023, flood, nearly every road in rural Greensboro was damaged by floodwater. Exactly a year later, town road crew and selectboard members were forced to determine again: Who’s marooned by broken roads? Who’s elderly or ill and needs immediate help? Can milk trucks get to the farms?

In the past year, the selectboard hired Josh Karp, an orchardist who lives with his family on the farm where he grew up, to laboriously assemble the FEMA reimbursement requirements for the million-dollar line of credit needed to cover the town’s 2023 flood costs. “In the queue,” Josh kept repeating. “We are in the queue for payment.” The word of the year was obligated, whatever mystery that might represent, how the straw of obligation might turn into gold in the town’s bank account, a feat not yet accomplished.

In the immediate aftermath of this 2024 storm – with most of us bleary-eyed, the road crew running on adrenaline, the office phones ringing and ringing and ringing – the selectboard gathered: an attorney in his ironed shirt running for state rep; a carpenter in cargo shorts; a retired investor who lived in Pakistan for five years and admires Indian motorcycles. During the prior night’s regular meeting, the board had voted to fill the fifth empty seat. A retired nurse, Bobbi Nesbit had calmly noted that she’d lived in the town for over 50 years, served on multiple boards, shepherded the elementary school through a contentious addition, and seen hard times. This morning, she arrived with her Irish setter and a loaf of banana bread still warm from the oven. We sat in the zoning room around a table spread with maps marked with July 2023’s FEMA flood work. Under emergency rules, the board voted to pursue funding for the threequarters-of-a-million dollars that would likely be needed for road repairs. Which conceivably would bring the two-year flood-repair debt for this small town to $1.75 million.

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phone – had a Mayflower Compact-esque moment.

Bobbi Nesbit wanted to explain why she had stepped into this empty seat. With a calmness that comes by nature or nursing or both, she remarked that our world is falling apart. No great news there for any of us, but she added, “We don’t need to fall apart, too. If we can’t make democracy work civilly in this small town, right here, right now, there’s no real hope. And I am not giving up.”

Through the open window, hard rain fell. c Later that day, I’m at the Mobil station in Hardwick. On the back end of the convenience store, Bud Hays runs a repair shop. Standing in his shop with the bay doors rolled up, he points to where a dirt parking lot had been the day before, beyond the diesel and kerosene pump. The river sheared away 100 feet of land, he tells me. Just behind the shop building, Bud’s grandfather planted oaks after the 1927 hurricane to hold the bank stable. The deep roots of these mighty trees are now exposed, their tangles reaching over the rushing river.

Beyond that hole-where-the-parking-lot-was, last summer’s flood destroyed the Inn by the River, strewing telltale red metal roofing down the riverbanks. Twisted pieces are jammed yet in the banks of branches and weeds. One day before 2024’s flood, the Inn’s final debris had been removed. What remains are tongues of irises beneath an apple tree and that ragged-edged sandy bank, layers of stone and soil that have been hidden for years, now crumbling into the swiftly running water.

The rainy night before, Bud lost two cars and a pickup. Standing under the spot-stained American flag in his garage, clutching my notebook and camera, I tell this kind man who keeps my car dependably running, “I’m so sorry, so sorry.”

An especially soft-spoken man, Bud tells me this can’t keep him up at night. “The river will do whatever it will do.” —Brett Ann Stanciu v e r mon t al m anac | vol u m e v

BRETT ANN STANCIU

After the 2024 storm at Hay’s Service Station in Hardwick. stor ie s f r om & f or t h e l an d

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can remember every bog I’ve ever visited.

There’s the Babcock Nature Preserve bog on a hot July day: an explosion of cotton grass and a thousand shades of green. There’s Molly Bog with my small grad school cohort and our instructor at peak foliage, with the sphagnum moss glowing magenta and the edge studded with bunchberries; I was so transfixed that I submitted my site report in the form of a color palette. Peacham Bog, Chickering Fen, Andromeda Bog, Colchester Bog, Moose Meadow Bog … and the nameless bog below Katahdin with my father, the day after our big hike – my first time there and his second; his return coming 30 years, almost to the day, after his first trip.

Bogged Down I’m not the only one who feels a special affection for bogs. The authors of Wetland, Woodland, Wildland say, “Entering a bog … is likely to be a long-remembered experience. There is an otherworldly character to bogs that is unlike any other part of our Vermont landscape.”

But what makes these peatlands so memorable?

Bogs and fens feel different from the rest of the New England landscape because they are different, starting with the hydrology. Most New England bogs form in glacial

kettle holes, where naturally acidic, nutrient-poor rainwater accumulates, stagnant and isolated from the flowing groundwater that carries minerals and oxygen into other kinds of wetlands. Sphagnum moss is one of the few species that thrives under these conditions, and it’s reinforced in a positive feedback loop that keeps bogs cold, wet, and acidic. The moss retains water, keeping the area saturated, insulating the bog and further acidifying its environment.

This permanent saturation suppresses microbial activity, allowing the fast-growing sphagnum to accumulate in annual layers of peat faster than it can decompose. Some New England bogs have been slowly filling in with peat for thousands of years, starting

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soon after the retreat of the Laurentide ice sheet.

Very little besides sphagnum can grow in such challenging conditions. Heath shrubs usually found much farther north, like leatherleaf, bog laurel, bog rosemary, and labrador tea, along with stunted black spruce and tamaracks, grow on the raised hummocks of bogs where the sphagnum is slightly less saturated. Most of these plants are evergreen – it takes a lot of mineral nutrients to produce a full set of new leaves each year, and keeping the old ones as long as possible is a good strategy in such a nutrientpoor environment.

The carnivorous pitcher plants and round-leaved sundews that grow in the wetter bog hollows use a different strategy, supplementing what little nutrients are available in the bog by trapping insects and absorbing the nitrogen from their bodies. Pitcher plants also get some nitrogen from nitrogen-fixing bacteria that colonize the rainwater that accumulates in their pitchers.

While all of these adaptations and feedback loops are fascinating, they don’t fully explain what makes bogs so memorable. What really draws me to bogs, I suppose, is that they make me feel wild and free in a way that no other landscape does. They feel like a glimpse of the deep past and a portal to the boreal north, the place where I feel most alive.

—Chelsea Clarke Sawyer

Turtle Bust There were plenty of stories related to illegal border crossings in 2024, but none quite like this. In early July, news broke that Wan Yee Ng, 41, of Hong Kong had been arrested after trying to cross the border between Vermont and Canada. In an inflatable kayak. While carrying 29 live turtles. Each wrapped in a sock.

The bizarre scene played out in Canaan, after Canadian authorities tipped off their American counterparts about the plot, which was uncovered when Ng’s husband, also a Chinese national, was spotted paddling toward the border from the north on Lake Wallace to meet her. That is a known smuggling route, though usually the cases involve humans and narcotics, according to authorities.

With all the other fantastic elements of the case, it might be easy to lose track of the primary reason for the bust: the turtles. It turned out that they were eastern box turtles, which according to the affidavit in the case can fetch up to $1,000 each on the Chinese black market. Those with especially colorful markings are particularly in demand. Ng was charged with illegally attempting to export the turtles, a violation of the US Endangered Species Act. If convicted, she faces 10 years in prison.

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An aerial view of the ponds constructed to provide wood turtle habitat.

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Building a Wood Turtle Wetland

s we walked across the hayfield, the farmer asked his five-year-old daughter whether she thought they should sacrifice the hay from a corner of the field to create some better habitat for the local wood turtles. He said, “We need land for making hay to feed the sheep, but the wood turtles also need more good areas to live in. What do you think we should do?” The budding conservationist paused for a few beats while she considered the two options, then said with the confidence of someone much older: “I think we should help the wood turtles.”

And so it was decided. We’d turn a one-acre corner of this ten-acre field in Orange County into wood turtle habitat. The farmer who leases the land would get by with less hay – the corner of the field was wet and only marginally productive anyway.

We’d build three semi-permanent ponds and turn part of an ag-field that often flooded back into a forested wetland with lots of woody plantings.

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Wood turtles (Glyptemys insculpta) are a semiaquatic species: they overwinter in streams, but spend much of their time on land, foraging for a wide variety of foods within approximately 300 feet of their home stream. They can live for more than 80 years, but do not begin reproducing until they are 12 to 20 years old.

Wood turtle populations are in decline in Vermont. In the Vermont Wildlife Management Plan, they are listed as a “Species of Greatest Conservation Need” and are considered at moderate risk of extirpation. They are also under review for listing under the Federal Endangered Species Act, with a preliminary decision set to be issued in the near future. Wood turtle survival is threatened by many things, including loss of habitat, being killed by cars and farm equipment, nest predation, and collecting for pets or sale. A large female was recently killed in the hayfield adjacent to this one, so we knew v e r mon t al m anac | vol u m e v

DAIVD SAGAN / USFWS

Biologist Ryan Crehan (left) and refuge operations specialist David Sagan, both of the US Fish and Wildlife Service, onsite during the project. stor ie s f r om & f or t h e l an d

KATIE KAIN / USFWS

the area had good habitat potential. Kiley Briggs, director of conservation for the Orianne Society, an organization dedicated to the conservation of reptiles and amphibians, confirmed that the particular stretch of stream where we planned the habitat work provided good nesting opportunities.

Prior to the wood turtle habitat work, this field was included in a USDA Conservation Reserve Enhancement Program (CREP) contract that included the planting of approximately 1,500 trees and shrubs along both sides of the stream.

This work was completed by Redstart Natural Resource Management of Corinth. The hope is that when the trees and shrubs grow, they’ll help to stabilize soils, reduce sedimentation into the brook, and cool the water by shading it. This first CREP contract led to the recognition that this area supported a successfully reproducing population of wood turtles. This awareness led to an additional CREP contract aimed at enhancing the habitat of this area to further support the turtle population.

All of this work was funded by the USDA, at no cost to the landowner. The CREP planning and

Wood turtle hatchling enrollment was handled by Ben Gabos and Phil Wilson from the Vermont Agency of Agriculture.

The habitat restoration plan was developed by Ryan Crehan and Katie Kain, biologists with the Partners for Fish and Wildlife Program of the US Fish and Wildlife Service. The first step was to obtain the necessary state and federal wetland permits, because this corner of the hayfield was a jurisdictional wetland. Because this was a federal job, we also needed an archaeological inventory, which determined that no sensitive archeological resources were present. Crehan and David Sagan, wildlife refuge specialist for the US Fish and Wildlife Service, were the hardworking pair who spent several very hot days in late July putting the plan into action. Using a rented excavator and skid steer, they dug three small (0.05- to 0.1-acre each) ponds, each about 30 inches deep. They used the excavated material to create upland hummocks adjacent to each pond. These hummocks provide landform diversity that is useful to the plants and animals occupying this area. Afterwards, they placed woody debris in and around the ponds to add texture and variety. When the work was complete, the ponds began attracting a nice variety of wildlife almost immediately. Within weeks I’d watched dragonflies, water beetles, green frogs (adults and tadpoles), a sandpiper, a kingfisher (hovering over a pond, apparently looking for frogs), deer, crows, and ravens. I haven’t seen a turtle in the ponds yet, but I anticipate that they’ll find their way into them before too long. Although our young conservationist hasn’t been back to visit the site since the work was done, I’m sure she’d be happy with the results. —Brad Wheeler

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Summer: Movement Patterns

hen the season is in full swing, the days stretch to their longest. The summer workday often stretches the longest, too. Consider your body’s mechanics and use efficient movement patterns to conserve energy over the course of days and weeks.

Movement is a compromise between our brain’s desires and our body’s ability to tackle a given task. Our brain filters down movement pathway possibilities until a compromise is met in our body, compensating for pulled muscles, injuries, mechanical constrictions (clothing/footwear), and other variables. While movement compromise Striving for healthy movement patterns is especially important with repetitive tasks.

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can feel beneficial on any single occasion, repetitive tasks can turn movement compromise into movement compensation. Over time, this might lead to problems elsewhere in the body.

Summer is a good time of year to focus on healthy movement patterns. For example, when squatting to lift a load, we want our feet flat on the ground and our torso upright (shoulders higher than hips). If, for example, there is decreased ankle mobility, our heels may come off the ground when we’re descending into a squat. This compensation may cause our brain to avoid a squat pattern and, instead, use a bend at the hips pattern, dropping shoulders to hip level or below, to accomplish the task. The result might injure our back or other parts of our body. —Cynthia Flores

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reflection

I have always loved the word reflection – the way it sneaks up from behind at different angles, shows off in the polished-chrome wing mirrors of some guy’s prized ’55 Thunderbird, preening in a bevy of vintage cars parked on Nichols Field; the way it dangles in pearly luster, in the teardrop earrings my neighbor wears; the way it both recedes and comes in close to face you like the supermoon, or those other random, skewed views – domestic interiors lost in orbit inside antique convex mirrors.

I love how it comes to play with sunlight on water, like an enviable toddler dancing freely with no one but himself; how it can be visible – image refraction – or audible – the way a wild echo will luff and taper as the loons call back and forth across the lake, deflecting their songs of hunger, lust, labor, distress, rapture, success; how the fledgling loon, taken aback with it, catches sight of her upside-down-self and laughs, coos her muted hoot, then trails along in the rippling tremolo of her mother’s wake.

For the pause it gives –

for pausing’s sake; for its open invite to anyone;

for its hey, wait, look – I have always loved the word reflection.

—Mary Elder Jacobsen, from Stonechat, first appeared in The Lyric stor ie s f r om & f or t h e l an d

have you tried

using your garlic

scapes as skewers ?

It’s a clever way to use an always overabundant crop.

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Vermont River Names ord origins are always interesting, and the backstories behind river names in Vermont are no exception. Here are a few notes on names, cribbed from Esther Munroe Swift’s wonderful Vermont Place-Names, one of the best Vermont history books we know.

has been translated as “big rattlesnake,” “big woman,” “much flint,” and “great grassy meadow.” Lower stretches of the river, before they enter the bay, were called Petagoubky, “rivers full of bends and eddies.” The native name stuck to the river and bay, but it proved too much of a mouthful for the town of Missisquoi, which renamed itself “Troy.” missisquoi

The black river gets its name from the Abenaki descriptor M’kazawitego, which means “black river.” Another Abenaki word for the river was Kaskact-chawack, meaning “at or near the mountains with steep sides” – paddlers along the eastern shore of Eligo Lake will appreciate this designation. A third was Alskachewack, translating to “at the great pile of shells,” probably referring to freshwater mussel shells gathered there.

The lamoille river ’s name comes from La Riviere a la Mouette, French for “the seagull river.”

In his engraving immortalizing the name, Samuel de Champlain forgot to cross the t’s in Mouette, so it read la Mouelle, which then morphed into Lamoille.

The passumpsic gets its name from an Abenaki word that loosely translates to “over clear sandy bottom.” According to Swift, Native Americans didn’t really name whole rivers – their words referred to a particular place on a river, not the entire water body. But we’re grateful to the mapmakers for appropriating the words, both as a nod to the place’s original inhabitants and because they’re so much more interesting than the recycled names the English favored.

The word winooski comes from the Abenaki term meaning “place of wild onions.” This river, of course, drains into Lake Champlain, which was, of course, named for the French explorer. A funny stor ie s f r om & f or t h e l an d

note on the lake’s name is that when Champlain wrote about the lake in his journal in 1609, he said “it was called Lake Champlain,” thereby avoiding the fact that he had named the lake after himself.

Champlain’s notations called today’s otter creek La Riviere aux Loutres, which was a French translation of the Mahican word Dawinehneh, “at the home of the otters.”

The ot tauquechee has been known by dozens of variants over the years, including “Water Quechee.” According to Swift, the name that stuck is probably from the Natick word meaning “swift mountain stream,” which makes the word’s English pronunciation onomatopoeic. batten kill (kill is the Dutch word for river)

was clearly named after someone named Batten, but no one knows who that was for sure.The Dutch derivation is a reminder of the influence New York had but then lost where it came to Vermont place names. Until about 1766, New York thought it owned Vermont. In fact, there were “paper towns” all through the state that New York mapmakers gave alternative names to. If the Green Mountain Boys hadn’t bullied the Yorkers into relinquishing their claims, Bennington would be Mapletown.

Cambridge would be King’s College (named after the college that is today Columbia University).

Swanton would be Rutland.

The west river flows southeast across Windham County and was so named because it starts on the west side of the county. See how the Native names are much more interesting?

The Abenaki name for the river was Wantastiquet.

According to Swift, who was a sixth-generation Vermonter, many of the people she knew in Windham County preferred to call the river by its native name.

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Not Down the Middle

ost waterbodies marking a boundary between two states or countries have an imaginary dotted line running down their middle. The Connecticut River does not, because as everyone who lives near it knows, the river belongs to New Hampshire. However, as with all things human, the circumstances are complicated. The river’s colonial ownership started with the original land grants from England, was modified during the time of the American Revolution, and was cemented by a set of US Supreme Court decisions in the 1930s.

The English grants set the boundary between what was then New York and New Hampshire as the western bank of the river. Soon after Vermont declared her independence, community leaders in 22 New Hampshire towns persuaded their fellow townspeople to secede from New Hampshire.

They were convinced that the actions of the Crown were no longer the law, and they wanted to eliminate the river as a jurisdictional boundary.

A convention of river towns from both states met in Cornish, New Hampshire, to consider forming a state called “New Connecticut,” as many of the settlers had migrated to the valley from eastern Connecticut. Instead, in 1778, the New Hampshire towns joined the new Vermont Republic, and (in their eyes, at least) the river was no longer a boundary.

New Hampshire leaders tried to appease the rebels with political appointments and support for the idea of annexing Vermont river towns into New Hampshire. When these approaches failed, New Hampshire asked the Continental Congress to settle the dispute, making it clear that unless Congress returned the towns, New Hampshire would no longer contribute to the war effort.

New Hampshire then took stronger measures and threatened to send 1,000 soldiers westward to the valley, ostensibly to protect against Native 235

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Americans and the British but, in reality, to take back the towns that Vermont had annexed.

In 1782, prodded by a letter from George Washington, Congressional actions, and the threat of a 1,000-man army headed its way, Vermont did a sudden about-face. Vermont’s Assembly voted to renounce jurisdiction over all towns east of the river and forsake any claim to jurisdiction east of the west side of the river beginning at the lowwater mark. The river was a state boundary again, and New Hampshire owned it.

Once the crisis was averted and Vermont was formally admitted into the Union as a free and independent state, its leaders tried to assert a claim over half the river. They invited New Hampshire to appoint commissions to settle the boundary in 1792, 1794, and 1830. New Hampshire offered no response to the first two invitations and a flat out “NO” to the last one.

In 1915, Vermont sued in a case that went to the US Supreme Court, asking that the boundary between the states be established as the thread (deepest part) of the Connecticut River. Vermont said it held title to the thread by virtue of English v e r mon t al m anac | vol u m e v

common law, and since Vermont joined the Union as a sovereign state, her boundaries were those she self-established – the thread of the river being the eastern boundary.

The Vermont suit did not at all daunt New Hampshire, which cross-filed with the Court to acquire jurisdiction over even the narrow width of land on the Vermont shore visible between the low- and high-water mark.

The Court found that by passing the 1782 Resolution, Vermont had relinquished any claim to jurisdiction east of the Vermont shore beginning at the low-water mark. The low-water mark was further defined as “the point to which the river recedes at its lowest stage without reference to extreme droughts.”As to the New Hampshire claim on the land between the high and low water marks, the Court found that even if New Hampshire had authority over the river there, enforcement would be insurmountably difficult. Therefore, in 1934, the US Supreme Court decided that New Hampshire got its river and Vermont got its shore land.

A Court Master surveyed the boundary and placed four-inch brass disk markers at the survey points. Still on the land today, they form a necklace at 112 locations from Vernon, Vermont, upriver to the 45th parallel, where the river crosses into New Hampshire entirely. Each marker gives the distance from that marker along a compass heading to the official low water boundary.

Vermont and New Hampshire laws require that the boundary line “shall be perambulated and markers and bounds renewed wherever necessary.”

Vermont law prescribes that the perambulation take place “once in every seven years.”

The Court even foresaw the potential for confusion due to power dams on the main river.

Its decision said that the surveyed low-water mark was to be “unaffected by improvements on the river.” The reservoirs behind the dams that have since been built have now submerged the natural low-water point, but the original surveyed locations remain the border, even though in some cases the boundary is more than 100 feet off the Vermont shore. —David Deen

OFFICE OF THE VERMONT ATTORNEY GENERAL

Vermont Attorney General Charity Clark and New Hampshire Attorney General John Formella met at the Connecticut River in October 2023 to “perambulate” the border, as is required to happen every seven years. stor ie s f r om & f or t h e l an d

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n the infamous November 1927 flood, the town of Waterbury was severed from the surrounding world as the water rose. Roads and railroads were destroyed. A booklet entitled When the Water Came to Waterbury: a Tragedy in Three Acts Depicting Scenes of the Great Flood of November, 1927, as They Occurred on the Panoramic Stage of Vermont’s Most Devastated Valley, compiled the following July and edited by Lloyd E. Squier, lists the lives lost. Particularly tragic among these were Mrs. Gladys Cutting, age 29, and her three young children, the oldest six. Her husband, Henry N. Cutting, had attempted to float his family to safety on a makeshift raft lashed together from doors he removed from his house’s second floor and launched from his veranda roof.

The raft capsized. Mr. Cutting was rescued hours later from the branches of a tree. Devastatingly, his family perished.

As the storm raged that night, help rallied as all available boats rescued the stranded from roofs

and upper floors and ferried folks to high ground.

Four hundred people sheltered in the high school.

Mr. and Mrs. Charles Parker lashed together two coffins from an undertaker, rowed their family to safety, and offered their vessel for further rescues.

On an uphill, the McNeil Bakery turned out thousands of loaves of bread. In nearby Stowe, women rallied around their wood-fired kitchen stoves as part of the community swell to feed flood victims and rescuers. “Milk from nearby farms was poured into Waterbury in a never ceasing stream,” the booklet notes. “While water was at a premium for many days, and almost impossible to get for drinking purposes at that time, there was always plenty of milk and cream, whole cans of it even being set out on the streets for any and all who wanted it.”

At that time, Waterbury was well known as the site of the Vermont State Hospital, which housed patients who suffered from diseases ranging from epilepsy to severe depression. Staff evacuated the first floor and put all the patients to bed. The hospital was a working farm that largely sustained everyone who worked and lived there. The farm

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couldn’t have predicted this, the New Era that arrived a few years later was the country careening into the Depression, which wound all the way from Wall Street to Vermont’s towns and hill farms. c was severely damaged: 121 Holsteins perished.

However, the hospital recorded no human loss of life, save for one resident who suffered from heart disease.

The morning after the flood, breakfast was served at the Congregational Church. As recounted in When the Water Came to Waterbury, “…

The mess continued through November, serving at the height of its usefulness, over 1300 meals during the twenty-four hours. From the morning of November 4th ‘till the evening of November 30th the ‘mess’ was never closed. As many as 150 meals were served one night between supper and breakfast, and the soldiers on guard duty always found hot coffee as they came from their posts.

“The climax of the month was reached with the Thanksgiving dinner, served by the Burlington Red Cross to the entire community of Waterbury. Nearly eight hundred sat down to a most complete feast served with homelike hospitality and good cheer.

“So day after day and night after night, the people came to this community ‘mess,’ not alone to eat, but to laugh over the amusing experiences of the flood and to cheer each other…. The whole history of this month of community feeding is shot through with good feeling; the willing service, the grateful appreciation of those served and the sense of comradeship….”

Road repairs began quickly, but in the era of the Model A and the horse and buggy, the railroads were the main connectors between towns. It wasn’t until three months later, in February 1928, that train service was restored. To a crowd of 2,000, Governor John Weeks proclaimed, “Vermont is entering upon a new era.” Although Weeks stor ie s f r om & f or t h e l an d

The 1927 flood resulted in several dam projects in the Winooski watershed: Wrightsville Dam north of Montpelier in Middlesex, the East Barre Dam, and the Waterbury Reservoir Dam – by far the largest of these projects, located on the Little River, twoand-a-half miles from the confluence with the Winooski. The immense earthen structure was designed to capture water that gathers in the valley from mountain run-off. The water level is regulated by conduits within the dam. A spillway controls excess water in significant flooding events.

To construct the dam, the Army Corps of Engineers hired 2,000 World War I veterans, enrolled in the Civilian Conservation Corps. Work on the project commenced in April 1935. Payment was $30 per month; $25 was mailed directly home to Depression-era families. In the three-and-a-half years of construction, CCC Camp Charles Smith, built to house those working on the Waterbury Dam, became its own mile-long village, with water and sewer, a fire and police department, multiple mess halls, an ice-skating rink, a movie theater, and a library with a collection of 6,000 titles. Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind, which topped the 1936 best-seller list, was likely among them.

The dam created the state’s ninth-largest body of water. Submerged beneath the approximately nine billion gallons of water are the foundations of the former Little River and Cotton Brook communities’ farmhouses, churches, and schools, a trade-off that surely stirred debate at the time. It’s worth remembering, though, that while the dam was built as a marvel of human engineering, the dam’s construction was also driven by the desire to avoid the repetition of the Cutting family’s tragedy on a makeshift raft. —Brett Ann Stanciu

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Making Room for Rivers

ark Twain, writer and riverboat captain, once wrote that running water “had a new story to tell every day.” These stories haven’t been great lately. Devastating floods have been a recurring theme in Vermont for two summers now, which naturally leads to questions about what’s happening with our rivers.

The simple answer is that as the planet (and more specifically the oceans) warm, there’s more water in the atmosphere. This saturation leads to more rain and catastrophic flooding. But, of course, the story is far more nuanced than this. Middlesex resident Mike Kline – whose experience includes three decades with the Watershed Management and Water Quality divisions of the Vermont Department of Environmental Conservation, including service as state river ecologist and managing the Rivers Program – identifies the following historical causes that have compounded the problem of too much moisture: deforestation . As 75 percent of the state

was cleared in the 18th and 19th centuries, there was a dramatic increase in the volume of water and sediment runoff. As the deforested hillsides eroded, channels and floodplains were often buried in over three feet of sediment. The river channels rose up, then eroded down through these materials, leaving terraced banks in some places that are inaccessible to the rivers when they need to flood.

accommodate farms and early settlements. This original work has been maintained ever since through channel armoring and extensive flood remediation projects. mills, dams, and diversions. While dozens

of dams are in place in each Vermont watershed today, historically there were hundreds.

These alterations make any efforts to restore river systems to their natural equilibrium challenging. extraction . Gravel removal has long been

advocated as a way to maintain straighter, deeper channels and control flooding. In practice, largescale gravel mining resulted in bed degradation, head cutting, channel over-widening, and severe bank erosion. The interstate highways, state roads, and thousands of miles of dirt roads in Vermont were built on materials commercially extracted from Vermont’s rivers. Today we’re paying the price for this. urbanization has led to more development

in and near floodplains, and more impervious surfaces which increase the rate of stormwater runoff. It’s also led to unrealistic and unsustainable human expectations.

snagging and ditching . In the 18th and

WOODSTOCK HISTORICAL SOCIETY

19th centuries, rivers were cleared of boulders, beavers, and woody debris so logs could be floated from forest to mill. Flood plains were ditched so they could be drained and planted. All of this increased the rate of water and sediment runoff. building in the wrong spots . Riverside

land was prized by colonial settlers, where they could farm the rich dirt and build their clapboard villages and mills near the water, which was a source of power. Drainage Societies were started to straighten and channelize streams to 239

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MIKE HARDIMAN

NATIONAL GUARD BUREAU

Left: Work begins to stabilize a river channel in Pittsfield in 2011 after Hurricane Irene.

Right: The Inn by the River, on the Lamoille in Hardwick, after July 2023 flooding.

The problem has no simple solution; a combination of approaches is required to repair the jagged imbalance between human use and healthy river corridors. Kline writes that the Vermont River Management Program “works with sister agencies and partners to offer funding and technical assistance in support of local projects that are part of a larger river corridor protection initiative.”

Examples of projects tailored to specific sites include bank stabilization, such as reconstructing retaining walls in tight village centers where rivers cannot be given additional space. Local conservation districts assist towns with projects like bridge and culvert replacement, often upsizing, to restore fish passage and stabilize streams.

The main way to reduce flood damage is to allow rivers and streams better access to floodplains, and so buyouts are being offered in some low-lying areas so homes and other structures can be removed and the river corridor and floodplain restored.

(The price is based on the property’s market value on the day before the flood.) Proposed buyouts are driven by FEMA funds, which are attached to a tedious, often tenuous, process. Although Vermont was estimated to have approximately a billion dollars’ worth of damage in July 2023, Vermont Public reported on July 1, 2024, that public records requests revealed that approximately $80 million of FEMA administration costs have resulted in just over $40 million in individual reimbursements stor ie s f r om & f or t h e l an d

for damaged property. Fifty-seven properties were identified for buyouts in that disaster, but according to Stephanie Smith, the state hazard mitigation officer for Vermont Emergency Management, only one had received funding a year later when the next round of flooding occurred. At the end of August, Smith noted that an additional eight projects had been submitted for FEMA review, with many more in the works. For any individual or municipality winding through the FEMA red tape, persistence and patience are key.

In addition, the state funded a Flood Resilient Communities Fund, with a few million dollars, for properties ineligible for FEMA money.

Four Hardwick properties were approved and demolished. (The Inn by the River, destroyed in July 2023, was removed just a day before the July 2024 flood. Much of the remaining riverbank washed downstream.) A dozen additional buyouts in different areas of the state are proceeding through the state’s more flexible program.

At the center of this multi-stranded approach is a holistic and cooperative mindset that will benefit humans and the natural world. There’s a trite phrase that the internet made the world smaller. Likewise, the rapidly changing weather, coupled with centuries of human hands on the land, consistently remind many of us that running water adheres to no survey markers.

—Brett Ann Stanciu

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Going In

y mother swam every morning of our family’s summer vacation.

She’d go in early, before anyone else was on the lake, and do a lazy sidestroke, first along the North Cove’s east shore, then along the west. Just before getting out, she would float for a minute on her back, arms folded behind her head. She’d then stand on the far end of the dock looking out, taking in the trees and cottages along the cove’s shoreline, the sloping ridge of Mount Moosalamoo. Mornings I was up early enough, I’d watch her at a distance. I may not have fully understood her need for this time away from the four of us children, but I knew her swims were important and not to be disturbed. By then, I had fallen in love with the lake, too; knew of the longing for it through the rest of the year; and had learned, from watching her, to memorize the feel of its water against my skin, to trace and retrace with my eyes the shapes of its shoreline and mountain, and to hold these things within me for as long as I could.

When our oldest daughter was tiny, I began my own ritual swimming every morning on summer vacation – on a lake in the Adirondacks – and have maintained it ever since. I go in early, as the sun is rising, before anyone else is about. On my favorite mornings, mist moves across the lake’s surface, maybe a loon calls, or a band of mergansers investigates the shore. I do a slow breaststroke so I can feel the smooth slip of water against my upper lip, keep my eyes level with the bobbing birds, and trace the shapes of trees above me and the silhouette of mountains against the lightening sky. Sometimes it’s raining. The air temperature, in late August, can drop as low as 40 degrees.

But it’s always worth going in.

PAUL GAUGIN, 1889

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I have a rule for myself that goes even further than those morning swims, the logical (or illogical) extension of what I learned from my mother: Any time I’m near water and think about going in, I go in. I don’t necessarily have to swim or go in over my head, but I must get wet up to my neck. If this means lying in shallow water and splashing myself, that’s fine. Screaming is allowed. Screaming is often necessary, in fact, for The Rule tends to come into play in places where the water is insanely cold: mountain streams, tarns, the North Atlantic. The Rule also tends to come into play when I’m totally unprepared: usually on a hike, without suit or towel. My husband, who keeps a healthy distance from cold water, will valiantly stand guard while I tear off my clothing. And though I appreciate his support for what I know he thinks is lunacy, I don’t really need it. Plunging in is so all-consuming, privacy is of little concern.

I never regret going in. The exhilaration stays for the rest of the day, cold and tingling, eventually working its way into long-term memory: Johns Brook on a warm September afternoon, the gray granite rocks mid-stream, the flashes of yellow foliage along the water’s edge. A sheltered niche on the mountainous west coast of Scotland, where, shrieking, my two thenpre-teenaged daughters and I charged in, while a harbor seal, bobbing nearby, watched.

There are mornings, of course, when the thought of getting wet makes me burrow deeper in the blankets, and times on a hike when I try to pretend I didn’t think of going in, because the idea of stripping and taking the plunge is too daunting. Part of the exhilaration is the knowledge that I pushed through my reluctance.

The few times I’ve not gone in, when comfort has gotten the better of me and I’ve ignored The Rule, linger with me as lost opportunities, disappointment. As if in the moment I decided not to, the landscape pulled back from me, and my life was somehow lessened.

Part of going in, I’m sure, is the desire to regain those lakeside summers of childhood; to feel that connection with my mother. The need to go in always comes when I’m in a place that – because of those summers – is profoundly, overwhelmingly beautiful to me: a place of mountains and water, a place that touches that deep, original imprint of a Vermont lake. Standing and looking – or even hiking and looking – are not enough, but seem shallow, fleeting. Others take photographs at such times, get on their hands and knees to identify plants, paint en plein air; my husband collects rocks.

I go in. I go in to feel the shock of cold water pass through my body, to immerse myself in something more substantial than air, to bring the mountains and water as close as possible to my bones and blood. I go in to prolong my presence, to feel a part of things, to be less on the earth and more of it. —Judy Chaves

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Moments of Profound Beauty

f you’re the type who begrudgingly mows the lawn, which is to say does it as little as possible with a thirty-year-old riding mower that lost its umph a decade back, there comes a time every August when you can’t keep up. It’s not so much the speed at which the grass grows as it is the moisture: the nighttime dew starts getting really heavy, and the sunlight declines enough so that the tree shadows lengthen and keep things wet even when it’s dry. This year my lawn crossed the threshold on August 7. At 4 p.m. that day there was still moisture on the grass even after a day of full sun. The only way to get through it was to mow with the blade on the highest setting, which is hardly mowing at all. And so what else can you do except be done for the year? Let the thing go, hit it with the brushhog once in late October to shred the fallen leaves and knock it back before winter, fin. On to more important things.

It was a largely unremarkable August, which after July’s heat and rain counted as a win.

Temperatures were a bit above normal statewide, as were humidity levels. Hurricane Debby passed through with some heavy rain and damaging wind, but there was nothing extreme. Mercifully, there was even a minor cold snap mid-month, with Montpelier recording its lowest August daily high temperature (58 degrees) since 1988.

Despite these minor blips, in all it was a typical summer-in-Vermont month.

There were moments of profound beauty. I live at the base of West Mountain, which obscures the horizon and pretty much negates sunsets. And yet on August 11, after the last of the Debby moisture finally exited the area, the entire sky lit up across the Valley of Vermont around 7:50 p.m. By 8:05 it was mostly gone, but during those magical 15 minutes every corner of the sky was drenched in pink and peach and purple. My household 247

stopped what we were doing and went outside and lay down in the long grass.

Another beautiful memory involves coming back from an agricultural fair the week of the 19th and seeing a blue supermoon rise over the corn fields near the Washington County, New York/Bennington County, Vermont line. The “supermoon” part of that term was because the moon was at its closest point to the earth in its orbit, so it appeared larger than a typical full moon. The “blue moon” part caused considerable discussion in the truck, since elementary school curricula and Trivial Pursuit cards have been telling us forever that a blue moon is a moon that happens twice in a month, which clearly wouldn’t apply to a moon on August 19. After some research, we found that the conventional twice-in-a-month interpretation is a relatively recent phenomenon – one etymologist pegs its birth to an edition of the NPR astronomy show “Star Date” that ran in 1980. Historically, a blue moon meant the third moon in a four-moon seasonal cycle. More often than not we have three moons in a summer: an “early-summer” moon, a “mid-summer” moon, and a “late-summer” moon. When there’s a fourth, they name the third one the blue moon, because you can’t very well have the late moon in the middle. This year, “Astronomical Summer” ran from June 20 to September 22, and the full moons occurred on June 21, July 21, August 19, and September 17.

“Meteorological Summer” – a measurement of time that bluntly fits the seasons into threemonth increments – runs from June through August. It was the second-warmest summer ever recorded and the eighth-wettest. During these three months, 29.48 inches of rain fell in St. Johnsbury, which is more than the average annual precipitation of 14 states. —Dave Mance III

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DAVE MANCE III

We looked back at our weather summaries from the past four volumes of Vermont Almanac and saw that in Montpelier in August 2023 it was overcast 74 percent of the time; August 2022 was hot and dry; August 2021 was hot and humid; and in August 2020 much of Vermont was in moderate drought. stor ie s f r om & f or t h e l an d

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GARY SHATTUCK

anada Lynx are considered endangered in Vermont and threatened nationally, so it’s always cool when we get a verified sighting in the state – the last occurred in Jericho in 2018. This photo was taken

by Gary Shattuck in Rutland County on August 17, 2024, which makes it especially cool.

It’s unusual to see a lynx this far south.

“Lynx are specially adapted to hunt snowshoe hares,” explains Brehan Furfey, wildlife biologist with the Vermont Fish and Wildlife Department. “Both species need young forest habitats and reliable snowpack to thrive. In Vermont, the best combination of climate, habitat, and enough hares to support lynx is in the Northeast Kingdom, and

Rare Lynx Sighting

even that is on the low end compared to areas of New Hampshire and Maine where lynx are more common.”

Assuming the animal came from established populations in the north, it’s worth imagining what it had to cross to get to Shrewsbury. Interstate 89,

perhaps. Or the Connecticut River and Interstate 91.

It’s crucial that we keep functioning wildlife corridors through which wildlife can disperse long distances through and around human settlement.

And the good news is that a corridor, in this case, worked.

JOAN HILDRETH

here ’ s a picture of the cold hollow sow and cub, three months later. It’s amazing how

much the cub has grown in a relatively short amount of time.

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Old Red Cedars

ed cedars can be found as early successional trees in the Champlain Valley, but persistent, natural stands are limited to rocky areas in warmer regions of the state.

Although not common here, this species is noteworthy.

Several years back, Matt Peters, a botanist and ecologist, climbed around rocky cliffs at six sites in different parts of the state, including West Haven, Addison, and Fairlee, where red cedars are found. Using an increment borer, he found that while the trees he sampled were not large – typically only 8 inches in diameter – they were quite old.

“The most promising trees were often at cliff brows and other precarious or difficult-to-reach microsites, if not actually down the cliff faces,” Peters explains. “They also often had large lower limbs, rocky impingements, highly asymmetrical trunks, narrow strips of live wood, and other factors that made them physically difficult or impossible to sample.” Nonetheless, his preliminary ring count found trees more than 100 years old at all of the six sites he visited, and specimens well over 300 years old at two sites.

Subsequent explorations by Peters in the summer of 2023 found wood from dead red cedars that showed those specimens had lived for at least 445 years. Though living trees this old have not been found in Vermont, they may be out there, clinging to the cliffs somewhere. —Virginia Barlow

bear corn (Conopholis

MATT PETERS

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americana) is an important food source for black bears, especially lactating mothers, and so maybe the Cold Hollow cub’s growth had something to do with this parasitic plant. Also known as cancer root and bumeh, it usually associates with oak and beech trees.

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Raising Monarchs

he gentle beauty of a monarch butterfly floating from flower to flower on a summer breeze moves us. We marvel at their long migration to winter in the mountains of Mexico and await their return. Their complete metamorphosis is a resounding metaphor for our own evolution.

These are just some of the reasons why the current decline in monarch populations is so distressing.

To be clear, raising monarchs in captivity is not a solution to reversing their population loss. This practice has not been shown to increase numbers in any meaningful way. What’s more, there are dangers to trying this at scale: raising purchased eggs in large numbers can lead to a decrease in the genetic diversity necessary for the health of the entire species and will drive an increase in disease and parasites.

PHOTOS BY JOYCE AMSDEN

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But with some care and attention, raising a few monarchs at home can be fun, educational, and transformative for children and adults. Below is a guide to try your hand at raising monarchs from egg to caterpillar to butterfly.

You’ll need: • A screened cage that is insect-proof and easy to clean.

• A water dish with a flower frog to keep the milkweed fresh.

• A reliable source of native milkweed.

• Time to feed the caterpillars and clean their cage every day. the process

First, set up your cage outdoors in a place where it’s protected from heavy rainfall, such as on a covered porch. Gather eggs or young larvae from wild, native milkweed by clipping off leaves or shoots and putting them in the cage. Monarch eggs are tiny white structures that are always laid on the underside of a milkweed leaf. Replace the milkweed with a freshly picked supply every day, or when it begins to wilt. Clean droppings from the cage daily – cleanliness is critical. To prevent pathogen transmission to developing larvae, don’t allow butterflies to emerge above feeding caterpillars. Instead, move the caterpillars aside or to a fresh cage.

Just before hatching, the shell grows very thin, and the caterpillar head is visible as a black dot at the tip of the egg. The larvae will shed its skin repeatedly through 5 instars, growing steadily larger. Toward the end of the larval stage (lasting 10 to 14 days), the caterpillar will stop eating, spin a silk pad, attach their cremaster, and hang upside down in a “J” shape for up to 18 hours.

Eventually, the caterpillar will cast off its skin, as if wriggling out of a tight sweater. In its place will be a chrysalis. The new chrysalis – smooth with gold markings – twists and turns as it finds its perfect form. For the first few hours, the chrysalis is very fragile and susceptible to damage. As the next 10 to 14 days pass, the chrysalis will darken and become increasingly transparent. Finally, wings become visible. Emergence is near. The chrysalis develops a split, and at last the butterfly emerges stor ie s f r om & f or t h e l an d

and hangs upside down from the remaining thin shell. The wings look very crinkled. The abdomen is distended with fluid. Over the next hour, the butterfly will sway gently and pump the fluid into its wings. Do not disturb. The butterfly must hang for its wings to inflate properly.

In a few hours or overnight, the butterfly will be ready to fly. It does not need to eat during this time. If it gets too active in the cage, the butterfly can damage other chrysalises, especially the newly emerged. It’s okay to leave the creature on top of the cage to fly when it is ready. If you need to move a butterfly, grasp the delicate being by both wings between thumb and forefinger and slowly lift until it lets go of its grip. If done gently, this will do no harm. —Joyce Amsden

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The Farm

ust about every summer when I was a boy, I went back to the 19th century.

I didn’t know it at the time. I was simply going with my parents to the farm where my mother, Dorothy Kennedy, had grown up.

But in reality, it was a shift of worlds, transferring me from the middle-class world of Knoxville, Tennessee, in the mid-1950s, to the rural world of Duxbury, Vermont, where my grandparents lived without almost any of the conveniences the world of my suburban existence had made familiar.

My grandfather, Homer Kennedy, had been born in 1885, and he still farmed in ways that he had grown up with: cows hand-milked, hay cut with a horsedrawn cutter bar and pitched, with pitchforks, into the haymows of an old English-style barn.

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The farmhouse, where he lived with his wife, Mary, and son, Charles, was extremely simple – perhaps today, some might call it primitive. It had neither electricity nor indoor plumbing. It was heated by two wood stoves. Grandpa and Uncle Charles cut and split all the firewood by hand, using axes and two-man bucksaws. No gas-powered chainsaws for them.

Because the little house had been built with green lumber, not a joint or timber in it was square or level. Floors in every room, upstairs and down, tilted idiosyncratically, and because everything was out of plumb, doors shut with difficulty, if they could be shut at all.

Water came into the house through a single, faucetless, one-inch pipe. It flowed continually from the pipe into a white enamel basin that sat in a white enamel sink, overflowed the basin and went down the sink’s drain into the farmhouse cellar below, where a ditch dug in the cellar’s dirt floor conveyed the water to an outside wall, where it disappeared.

There were no flush toilets. For the calls of nature, we used two- and three-hole outhouses.

And because there was no electricity, the house was lit entirely by kerosene lamps. One of my early memories is of carrying, oh-so-carefully up the stairs to my second-floor bedroom, a lit lamp full of kerosene, vividly aware that if I dropped it, it would burn the house down. Fortunately, I didn’t drop the lamp. The house never burned. (A different fate lay in store for it.) And despite the obvious risk, fire was essential to the life of that skewed little house. It lit the rooms of the place at night and warmed them (somewhat) through the long Vermont winters.

The kitchen was really the heart of the house and the black-and-chrome woodfired cookstove was the heart of the kitchen. A squat iron god, it had a small firebox that heated the stove’s flat cooking surface, its oven, and a rectangular tank filled with steaming hot water.

Grandma (Mary Leighton Kennedy) expertly fed thin sticks of split maple into the firebox and kept the stove heated through most of the day. She was an expert baker. How did she manage this with a woodstove? Years of experience, probably.

In any case, the pantry, an alcove next to the kitchen, always smelled sweet – of cookies, homemade doughnuts, cakes, and cornbread, all overlaid with a dusty smell of flour.

There was a circular vent in the kitchen ceiling that let heat from the cookstove rise through the floor and into the bedroom area above. And some mornings, if I woke up early, I would tiptoe over to the vent, get down on my hands and knees, and listen to my grandparents and Uncle Charles talking softly as they prepared their breakfast and got ready for the day ahead.

Spying on the grownups! Even though I could hardly ever pick out a single discernible word. The smell of bacon frying was an additional attraction of the circular heat vent.

We were there only in the summers, and I remember eating ears upon ears of sweet corn, corn grown by my grandfather next to the big bean patch where he grew yellow string beans that he sold to the Demerit Canning Company in Waterbury.

Those yellow beans were one of the very few sources of cash the farm had. The Kennedys never had much money. Once, after the farm was only a memory and Grandpa and Grandma were both gone, I mentioned my years there to Keith Wallace, the county agricultural agent, and later a state senator. stor ie s f r om & f or t h e l an d

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“Oh yes, I remember Homer Kennedy,” he said. “He was a real old Vermonter – lived not so much on income as on lack of expense!”

And when my cousin, Kevan Hartshorn, once brought some of his friends from Boston to see the farm and meet the Kennedys, they were shocked at what they considered abject rural poverty.

“Oh my gosh,” one exclaimed. “Do they have enough to eat?”

We all got a good laugh out of that, remembering the corn-eating contests we had, stuffing ourselves with heavily buttered sweet corn until we could eat no more.

Most of those summer days we were outdoors, all day long. The farm in summer was a great place to be a kid. There were fields to run in, a brook to catch frogs and build dams and wade in, woods to explore, gnarled apple trees to climb, and a barn full of sweet-smelling hay to jump into and cover ourselves with. (The barn also housed cows and Old Joe, an aging Belgian workhorse. They had stalls in the back of the barn soaked with manure that was not so sweet-smelling. We stayed away from there).

When Grandpa’s crop of yellow beans was ripe, we would pick and stuff them into big burlap sacks. I picked plenty of beans at a penny a pound, and Grandpa paid me – a dime or two, which was about all the bean-picking I was good for.

We hoarded our dimes and on trips into Waterbury, the nearest village of any size, spent them on comic books, being good young consumers and, without knowing it, budding capitalists!

There were so many ways to spend the summer days. But what stays with me most is not so much the specific things we did, but the sense of being free – cut loose to range over the meadows and farms, barn and sheds without adult supervision.

Our days were long and completely unstructured. We were simply shoved out the door after breakfast, appeared briefly for the midday meal, and then not expected to show up again until dusk. We were sometimes bored, but never constrained.

Once or twice each summer, when the hay had been mown and was curing in the summer sun, we would pile into the iron-wheeled farm wagon drawn by Old Joe, and go with Grandpa and Uncle Charles down to the lower meadow. Theoretically, we were helping bring in the hay, though how much actual help two little boys armed with pitchforks were was minimal, at best. These were usually hot, sunny July days, and my strong Uncle Charles and Grandpa did the work, while Peter and I pitched on our wisps of hay and somehow, miraculously, never impaled each other or anyone else.

The load of hay was stacked higher and higher in the wagon’s wooden bed, Charles and Grandpa reaching up with full pitchforks as high as they could. Finally, they would declare it “a load,” and would boost us up onto the top of the quaking stack. It was usually Grandpa who drove Joe and the wagon – loaded to capacity with sweetsmelling cured hay and two little boys – down the road, as Uncle Charles walked alongside. Old Joe clop-clopped meditatively along as the familiar roadside trees and mossy banks unfurled past us and we slowly made our way back to the farm, the dirt driveway, past the yellow farmhouse and up the grassy path to the red barn.

Then we’d get to jump off the wagon into the haymows, and Grandpa and Chinkie (Uncle Charles’ nickname) would pitch the hay in after us, forkful by forkful.

It was probably those long, free-form days that gave me my somewhat romanticized love of Vermont. Later, in mid-life, I became editor-in-chief of the state magazine, Vermont Life, and I suspect the warm and softly glowing picture of Vermont that I translated to the magazine and that still lives in my head was a 255

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product of my summers, running free, on the Kennedy farm.

The farmhouse is gone now, along with everyone who lived in it. The barn has collapsed, and the acres of fields and meadows have been erased by the return of the surrounding forest. But it all lives on in my memory – enhanced no doubt by my imagination and the passage of years.

It’s imagination, for example, that grafts certain Robert Frost poems onto a window or a staircase in the remembered farmhouse. The staircase up which I carried the lit kerosene lamp has become, as I mentally envision the poem, the stage on which the grim drama of “Home Burial” takes place.

The window at the top of those stairs has become the window from which first Amy and then her husband look out and see, across an open field, the fresh grave of their young son. And that field leads (again, in my envisioning of the poem) not across my grandfather’s hayfield, but to the little family cemetery of the poem where the boy’s remains lie.

“Not so much larger than a bedroom, is it?,” the husband asks, Frost’s hint that their marriage, like their first-born son, is dead.

Another window, a downstairs one with multiple panes, fits neatly into “An Old Man’s Winter Night,” which describes the lonely winter vigil of an aged, isolated man in an isolated farmhouse, and begins: “All out of doors looked darkly in at him Through the thin frost, almost in separate stars, that gathers on the pane in empty rooms...”

The window and the farmhouse that I actually knew stand in perfectly in that poem, and come to me clear and distinct as a photograph every time I read it.

Another of the Kennedy family’s living room windows looked north, across the Winooski River to the cliffs of Bone Mountain, high above. I was told by my aunt, Ruth (Kennedy) Hartshorn, that my mother, Dorothy, used to sit by that window for hours, silently watching the light on the mountain change. Dorothy died in middle age, and so I never got the chance to ask her about that.

Life on the Kennedy farm may have been simple, but I never felt it was threadbare, or that my grandparents might have been poor.

Their lives were not perfect. They had their sorrows – deep sorrows – and their darknesses. Nevertheless, their lives had a richness that our contemporary world, despite its comforts and conveniences, often lacks.

They didn’t have television or computer-fed entertainment. They didn’t even have central heating or indoor plumbing. But they did have the satisfaction of honest work, well done. And they had each other.

Not a hundred yards from their front door, down a steep bank, they had the Winooski River, flowing west. They had the forest-clad mountains, rising all around their little swatch of meadows and pastureland. Their connection to their land was deep and they knew the land intimately. That 200 acres had been farmed by the Kennedy family since before 1800.

They weren’t separate or shut off from nature. They depended on it, and in a very real and sometimes gritty way, they were a part of it.

And without fully knowing it, in those long-ago summers, I became part of it, too. —Tom Slayton stor ie s f r om & f or t h e l an d

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Slowing Down

hen Craig and I bought our house in The Hollow 40 years ago, the road through the village was a quiet back route, and the village itself – some 50, 60 households – could easily have been described as sleepy.

But as housing in Chittenden County, just north of us, became unaffordable, people who worked in the Burlington area started moving to northern Addison County, a bastion of stillaffordable homes, and our road became a major commuter route. Everyone living east of us – in Monkton, Hinesburg, Bristol – used our road in the morning to get to Route 7, and in the late afternoon, they used our road to get home.

Even during non-rush hours, trucks servicing all the new development on either side of us came through The Hollow hauling things – big, heavy, clanging things. And everyone was in a hurry. Speeds, way above the 35-mph limit, made walking along the road feel life-threatening. All outdoor activity was punctuated by traffic noise, conversations were constantly interrupted. My cello studio was in the front of our house, giving me the option of either opening the windows for

a cooling breeze and being unable to hear my students without the accompaniment of trucks, or keeping the windows shut and sweltering.

Then, the summer of 2011, a miracle happened: the bridge over Lewis Creek at the east end of the village had to be replaced. Its concrete and cables, dating back to 1958, when it replaced a 100-year-old covered bridge, were beyond repair.

For the eight blessed weeks of bridge demolition and construction, Old Hollow Road was a dead end. The only ones driving it were those of us who lived in the village west of the Creek. There were no commuters, there were no trucks.

The quiet was astonishing. “You can hear the birds in the morning,” was a common refrain. Kids on bikes – kids I hadn’t even realized lived in The Hollow – came out of the woodwork. Neighbors who normally kept to their backyards now sat on their porches, visited on front lawns, chatted in the middle of the road. We held a block party.

Two dozen of us sat in lawn chairs straddling the center line, drinking beer. There were games, a pot luck, and barbeque. A local band played, and we danced in the street.

Several of us discussed the possibility of blowing

GOOGLE

A 2023 Google Street View camera happened to catch a volunteer tending to the Lewis Creek bridge flower boxes.

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RSG INC.

A 2013 “traffic calming” study looked at ways to slow speeds through The Hollow, including more traditional approaches like signage and enforcement.

A community association formed to help address the issue chose to focus on an additional strategy: increasing the sense of beauty and pride along the road.

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JUDY CHAVES

up the bridge once the replacement work was done.

(Okay; maybe we’d had a few too many beers.)

(Then again, maybe not.) We’d been given a taste of paradise that summer – of quiet and safety and community – and we didn’t want to give it up.

So we formed a village association with the goal of slowing traffic. We convinced the town to apply for a grant to cover a traffic calming study of The Hollow, got the grant, and once the study was done, pored over the report’s suggested trafficcalming strategies. Blowing up the bridge was not one of them, but “streetscape enhancement” was.

If we could provide drivers with visual evidence of life in The Hollow, let them know that this was a residential area and not a speedway, they would be more likely to slow down.

Thus, streetscape enhancement became our mission. We held monthly meetings, formed committees, hosted fundraisers, assembled work parties. We discovered that among us were graphic artists, carpenters, woodworkers, artists, an historic preservationist, local history buffs, landscapers, horticulturalists, a hydrogeologist, and land use specialists, all of whose skills and knowledge and contacts came to the fore. We made bright red gateway signs for the four entrances into The Hollow (Welcome to the Village of North Ferrisburgh, Established in 1762, Please drive slowly), hung roadside banners designed by local schoolchildren, coordinated with a local Eagle Scout troop to

build a little free library, and installed flower boxes along the new Lewis Creek bridge. All of these things – signs, banners, library, flowers – would announce to the commuters and truck drivers and blasting motorcyclists that this was a community they were going through. That we live here.

And in the process of doing all this – the fundraising events, the winter meetings to discuss flower box design, the spring gatherings to plant and install the boxes, the celebrations for the children’s banners, the grand opening of the little free library, the emergency get-togethers to remedy streetscape enhancement infrastructure crises (gateway signs gone atilt; our usual water source for the flower boxes becoming no longer available) – we’ve discovered not only one another’s skills and capabilities, but that we enjoy one another’s company. I don’t wish speeding traffic on any community, but it has, in a way, been a blessing in disguise for us. Maybe our goal when we formed the association 10 years ago was to slow traffic down, but our most successful accomplishment may well lie in realms that may be even more important.

We’ve come to know and appreciate and rely upon the amazing people who are our neighbors.

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And the traffic? Has it slowed over the past decade?

Honestly? I don’t know. There are days I’m convinced it has slowed down, days I’m ready to tear my hair out from the noise.

But I do know this: When you’re out there on the bridge doing your stint of watering and deadheading the 12 boxes of red begonias, purple petunias, deep blue salvia, lime green sweet potato vine, and magenta verbena (or at least that was the mix this past summer; the makeup of the boxes is a matter of considerable annual debate), you do see the difference the project has made. Sure, you might find yourself thinking it’s a thankless and even pointless task, standing in the blazing heat of July, poking around in the tangle of flowers and leaves with your scissors and hose nozzle while the cars and trucks roar by inches away, splattering

JUDY CHAVES

The beautification of the bridge is a community effort.

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water in your face when they run over the hose.

But at least once each stint – and it’s often more than that – some car slows and stops mid-bridge, the driver rolls down the window and shouts out “thanks!” “I love these flowers.” “You have no idea how much these cheer me up.” “Thank you for all this beauty.”

And I also know this: Last summer, a week after the flower boxes were installed, two of them disappeared. Stolen, we figured – or maybe pushed off the bridge during a rowdy Saturday night (A neighbor reported having heard loud voices). Deeply dispirited – in the association’s 10 years, nothing like this had ever happened – we posted a notice on Front Porch Forum telling of the theft and asking for the boxes’ return – or at least for information.

In response, no boxes or information came, but instead, donations for replacements. They came from those in the village, but also from commuters.

And they came with expressions of thanks and of just how important the flower boxes are.

So I’ve had my head turned around about traffic calming. I realize I’d first approached streetscape enhancement with a fortress mentality, as if we were under siege from enemy forces, and the whole point of the signs and banners and flower boxes was to let people know they were crossing a boundary, that we live here.

But over the past 10 years of having drivers stop and give thanks; after seeing folks from out of town stop on a regular basis at the little free library; after this past spring, when commuters gave toward replacing the stolen boxes, I realize that the reason these things work – if they do work – is that their message is more expansive.

More inclusive. They say “You live here, too.” They say that just because you’re in your car, just because you’re driving a big truck, you aren’t separate from or immune to your surroundings. They say that life – Vermont life – hasn’t been put on hold until you reach your destination.

The folks who slow and stop and give thanks, the readers who check out the most recent holdings of the library, the commuters who donated toward the replacement boxes: they get it. They get the message. They live here. You live here. We all live here. —Judy Chaves v e r mon t al m anac | vol u m e v

provide the increasingly rare experience of driving through a covered bridge.

There’s a chance that I’m Today, the bridge is still there romanticizing our early years in The Hollow, and the village road on the west side of Route 7, a wasn’t as quiet in the mid-1980s mile-and-a-half south of the Old Hollow Road intersection. It as I like to remember. Thirty sits between the old farmhouseyears before Craig and I even turned-retail-shop and a moved to the village, there was restaurant, and though it’s no already enough traffic on the longer drivable, it is open to road to warrant removal of the pedestrians. You can park your 100-year-old covered bridge car and have the quintessential that spanned Lewis Creek at Vermont experience: buy a The Hollow’s east end. Fallen flannel shirt, walk through a into disrepair, too narrow for covered bridge, and eat a farmlarge trucks, the town-latticeto-table meal. style bridge was deemed a Sometimes, driving past the traffic hazard and, in the “Spade Farm Bridge,” I find name of modernization, was myself thinking how silly and a condemned. In July of 1958, it bit sad it looks there, like a wild was replaced with two lanes of animal held in captivity, serving concrete and steel. no purpose other than to be But the bridge, slated for gawked at. And I think about demolition, wasn’t demolished. what things would be like in It was given to a local farmer, The Hollow had the town, back Sam Spade, who knew a good in 1958, waited to replace the tourist attraction when he saw bridge, waited for a time when one. Spade had the bridge the “modernization” mentality moved to his farm on Route 7, where he already had a gift shop, had evolved into an appreciation for historic preservation. Maybe and did enough repair work the covered bridge would have on it to enable cars to drive been kept in place, restored, through. The drive-through strengthened. I like to imagine didn’t go anywhere, of course it there, still spanning the Creek, – the relocated bridge spanned limiting the size and number a small farm pond – but it did the spade farm bridge

of trucks going through The Hollow, reducing the speeds of vehicles heading into the bridge and coming out. I like to imagine us having that beautiful wooden structure as a focal point of the village, to walk to, to linger on, to fish from, to run our hands over and thus know our connection to the past.

When I hear about the “modernizations” of the ’50s and ’60s, I usually think about the destruction wrought by urban renewal, its dissection or total elimination of city neighborhoods, such as happened in the North End of Burlington. But that mindset also took its toll on rural communities, not only in the loss of beautiful, historic structures, but in the effect of those losses on the quality of village life. I can understand the thinking of our town in 1958; I understand the importance of keeping the wheels of commerce rolling.

But when the town replaced the wooden bridge with concrete and steel, I doubt they foresaw the full set of consequences: just how many wheels there’d eventually be, or how very fast those wheels would come tearing through our lives. —Judy Chaves

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RICHARD E. ROY COLLECTION

Left: The covered bridge in its original location, spanning Lewis Creek in North Ferrisburgh.

Right: Since being moved to the Spade Farm in 1958, the bridge has been a tourist attraction along Rt. 7. stor ie s f r om & f or t h e l an d

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Building a Regional Food Hub in Hardwick

D

rive into Hardwick from the west on Route 15, through Morrisville and Wolcott, along the Lamoille River, and you’ll cruise past a big yellow barn on the right. This barn, an iconic gambrel-roofed structure known in recent decades as the Greensboro Garage, marks the entry to Hardwick. Tim Nisbet and Stephen Ferber started their auto repair shop in Greensboro, outgrew that space, bought the yellow barn, and carried another town’s name to Hardwick. For nearly 30 years, the Greensboro Garage crew kept the community’s vehicles roadworthy, with a side gig of selling and renting used cars.

Lanky Nisbet, who’s been Greensboro’s town moderator since the Carter administration, took over the barn from Tony Washburn. Washburn had operated a body shop and sold southern “rust free” cars. The deal included an agreement to allow Washburn to finish restoring a 1950s Chevy in the barn. Nisbet worked around the Chevy.

Decades before Nisbet and his mechanics arrived on the scene, the barn was part of a 300acre farm that spread up the hillside and along the Lamoille River. Now, a car dealership, a chain grocery store and pharmacy, a hardware store, and a log yard operate nearby on both sides of

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The Yellow Barn, pre-renovation.

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Route 15. Masked by cedars to ameliorate traffic, a stately brick farmhouse stands across the road, long ago separated by deed from the barn. In the barn’s extended history, cattle were once auctioned here and herded to the nearby railroad to roll out of town.

The past is buried on this site in more than lingering stories. In the early 80s, the state buried remains of a replaced bridge on what became Greensboro Garage’s lower parking lot. When Nisbet plowed, he sometimes churned up chunks of concrete and metal that the frost had pushed up from the former bridge’s burial ground.

Not long after Nisbet started wrenching apart engines, a man stopped by and negotiated a deal to paint the barn. With a power washer, he stripped off the paint and coated the clapboards with white primer. People stopped in the garage office and asked what was happening. Surely, the paint color wouldn’t change? The yellow barn marked the entrance to the town. Nisbet matched the original hue the best he could.

Nisbet and Ferber eventually retired and sold the business and buildings. The barn’s second floor, a former hayloft, was a decades-rich stash of building materials and auto parts. In 1970, Hardwick Academy had been demolished when a consolidated middle and high school was built.

Nisbet found plenty of Academy salvage in the barn. He installed the banisters in a house he was renovating in Greensboro, hand-hewn woodwork far finer than anything on a big box store shelf. in 2017, a major restoration and expansion project

began on the Yellow Barn site to create a center for agriculture and community, headquartered in the Northeast Kingdom and viewed as a state model.

Slated to open in 2024, the property, now owned by the Town of Hardwick but fiscally managed by the Northeast Kingdom Development Corporation (NEKDC), is home to three occupants. Cabot Creamery leases the entire barn to showcase its retail products, a variety of Vermont food and crafts, and local history. During reconstruction, the barn was lifted, its rotted sills chainsawed off, and a proper foundation was poured before the structure was slowly eased back down. A covered stor ie s f r om & f or t h e l an d

porch and glass doors look out toward the former railbed, now the Lamoille Valley Rail Trail.

The other two businesses onsite occupy a new steel warehouse, built over the parking lot where Tim Nisbet once plowed up those broken pieces of a former bridge. As the building began to rise in the summer of 2024, the town grapevine buzzed curiously about “the box.” Half of this 22,000-square-foot warehouse is leased by the Cellars at Jasper Hill Farm, owned by the Kehler brothers in Greensboro. [Editor’s Note: See Volume III of Vermont Almanac for a closer look at this nationally known cheese-making outfit.] The other half is occupied by the Center for an Agricultural Economy. Founded as a nonprofit in 2004, the CAE has long been considered an amorphous entity, doing something, but precisely what is hard to pinpoint. Perhaps the challenge of summing up CAE’s work relates to the Center’s multistranded endeavors. At its core, the Center supports local agriculture. To accomplish this, its focus has been on the interdependence between farmer and dinner table in the vein of Wendell Berry’s assertion that “Eating is an agricultural act.” Simple in words, stunningly complex in practice.

A few decades ago, Andrew Meyer, from a multi-generational Vermont family, grew up on a Hardwick farm and went on to work on national farming policy in Senator Jim Jeffords’ Washington D.C. office. But Meyer kept thinking about agriculture in a Vermont-scale way.

Influenced by systems thinking – a problemsolving approach that considers the whole rather than focusing on parts – he kept pondering the interrelationships of agriculture: forestry, farming, distribution, sustainability. When Meyer returned to Hardwick to raise his young family, he started his own ag-based business, Vermont Natural Coatings, and initiated what became the Center for an Agricultural Economy. The CAE started out in a shoebox Main Street office with a board of directors weighted with farming experience and innovation, including Pete Johnson of Pete’s Greens, Tom Stearns of High Mowing Seeds, and Annie Galliard of Surfing Veggie Farm.

From the get-go, CAE’s concept was to promote sustainable and economically viable agriculture. This leads into interesting terrain.

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Meyer envisions what he calls agricultural prosperity for the Hardwick area. His vision extends far beyond a bank balance. Take, for example, a crop of tomatoes. From a systems vantage, the value of local tomatoes isn’t defined simply by their price per pound; instead, it stretches to include everyone who had a role in the lifecycle of those tomatoes. Who participated in growing, harvesting, and processing the crop? Did the tomatoes feed children and help them grow?

Valuing the interconnectedness of community eludes the measurement of a numerical figure.

CAE’s stated mission envisions a Vermont future “with thriving landscapes, healthy local food, and vital, equitable communities” and acknowledges that the winding path to the future leans on “a place-based agricultural economy and intentional community development…”

To accomplish this, the Center spreads into the community in multiple ways.

In 2008, as part of community outreach, CAE purchased Atkins Field, the 15-acre historic site of granite cutting sheds. Now, a thriving farmers market, community gardens, and a pavilion are used by the public. CAE also manages the Vermont Farm Fund, a revolving fund that gets capital to farms in a “no-hassle, friendly-terms” way.

In 2011, the Vermont Food Venture Center moved from Fairfax to CAE’s headquarters in Hardwick. Today, the commercial kitchens that were installed are rented by small producers – including a number of family food endeavors – who make and package their products, from granola to maple sugar. Additionally, the Center provides business education, tailored to producers’ specific needs. One example is how to scale up a homemade, farm-grown recipe for bruschetta to large batches, while retaining the homestyle flavor.

The Food Venture Center offers food preparation safety instruction and advice on how to get that bruschetta to dinner tables. Concurrently, CAE helps farmers navigate grants and evaluate new endeavors.

The layers continue. In the Venture Center, local businesses like the two-parents-with-twolittle-girls-owned Local Donut rent warehouse space to store bulk purchases, such as flour. The Just Cut program preps veggies in varying shapes 263

– diced, sliced, julienned – for large buyers such as schools and medical centers. The 2023 tally was over 160,000 pounds of processed vegetables bought from more than 20 farms, and served in some 40 institutions. UVM students dine on diced potatoes grown in Vermont soil. Schools and medical centers serve fresh coleslaw. The Center also distributes produce through area food shelves and community meals.

CAE’s half of the new warehouse building will house a teaching kitchen, conference space, and offices. The majority of square footage, however, is designed as dry, cold, or frozen storage space for Farm Connex. Farm Connex, in simple words, is a delivery service. Distribution is one of the biggest challenges for smaller farms in rural areas. CAE Executive Director Jon Ramsey (a Greensboro chicken farmer who was one of the Food Venture Center’s first storage clients) observes that the distribution of local food changed in the pandemic. Distributorship scaled vertically. Farms deemed too rural or too small were dropped. Ramsey describes Farm Connex as “an organic model. Essentially things are feeding in, things are feeding out. Sometimes they never feed in, they just head on their way. But we’re moving all kinds of agricultural products, either value-added items like dumplings or simply something like flour.” Large farms, like Strafford Organic Creamery, benefit, but so do the smaller enterprises, like Rusty Bird Farm, a one-couple, two-acre farm in Walden.

Farm Connex Logistics Manager Meryl Friets offers a few numbers. Farm Connex runs five trucks, Monday through Saturday, generally 20 routes a week, with an average of 10 to 16 stops on each route. Drivers head out to almost every county in Vermont and make a few stops in northern New York and New Hampshire.

The routes include 320 delivery locations (some more active than others) and 80 to 90 producers, ranging from the intergenerational Butterworks Farm to Ghost Dog Dairy, a family goat and garlic farm. Farm Connex’s four main products are dairy (milk, cheese, yogurt, ice cream – “lots of ice cream,” Friets notes) meat, eggs, and veggies.

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A sample route includes dropping off Just Cut produce just down the road for the youngsters at Hardwick Elementary, before the truck swings by Hazen Union School with food to feed teenagers.

Multiple schools are on this route, from Cabot to Glover, Troy to Irasburg. Pete’s Greens CSA is delivered to several locations. Store deliveries include Marty’s 1st Stop in Danville and The White Market in Lyndonville. Depending on orders, the truck stops at Trenchers’ Farmhouse – a farm-to-pasta project – Morningstar Farm, Kingdom Mountain Maple, Berry Creek Farm.

Additional routes wind through the Mad River Valley and Chittenden County. When the Farm Connex driver unloads two pallets at Burlington’s City Market, the producers’ invoices are left with the Market. Farm Connex only bills for its delivery fees. Friets notes that when CAE moves into the new, yet-unnamed building, the multiple loading docks will improve efficiencies of time and space, freeing up the late-afternoon jam when five trucks would previously arrive at a single dock. Frozen and cold storage will be expanded. In the vein of creativity and innovation that defines CAE, the

new space’s use will doubtlessly shift and change as needs and possibilities arise.

In the pandemic, the Center served over 50,000 meals through the Hardwick Area Community Meal Project, part of Vermont Everyone Eats, the state’s mutually supportive endeavor for farmers, restaurants, and, of course, eaters. More recently, in July 2023, floods ravaged the Hardwick area, including Atkins Field and Hardwick’s Tops Supermarket. The day after the flood, CAE began raising private funds for food vouchers, handed out by Hardwick Rescue volunteers to anyone in need. The Yellow Barn site did not flood. much as tim nisbet had to answer about the

barn’s paint color, questions have been levied about building near the confluence of the Lamoille and Black Rivers, about what’s happening, who will benefit, who’s paying for what, and the stark look of a warehouse on a former farm site – queries with answers far more involuted than a paint color. Ramsey notes, “It is literally a box, but an essential one.”

KELLY BOGEL STOKES

“An essential box’’: The new 22,000-square-foot warehouse facility, seen here under construction, will be home to the Center for an Agricultural Economy and provide storage for Jasper Hill Farm. stor ie s f r om & f or t h e l an d

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in the old testament, Joseph crammed the

communal larder with grain in anticipation of drought and famine. Two thousand years later, in Collapse, Jared Diamond identified climate exhaustion and political failure as key elements of why great civilizations have crashed, from the Maya to the Easter Islanders. In the 21st century, the pandemic created an ineradicable chasm in our collective experience, a division from a world where many of us churned through our day-today lives, to a fraught world fissured with mask shortages and mandates, rife with fears about the rapid onset of illness or vaccinations. For many of us, the pandemic drove to the forefront our essential physical needs: food and shelter. While Vermont treads ahead of the curve regarding loyalty to local food, even here interest surged during the pandemic when widespread concerns about the industrial food system rattled many households. Ramsey describes CAE’s work as an alternative model to the industrial food system.

This network tenaciously burrows into Vermont soil, analogous to a forest’s mycorrhizal root system which communicates underground to nourish and protect the whole. Likewise, this model understands agriculture as a landscape totality, not segmented into individual farmers

and separate stores and restaurants, never favoring one family’s pantry, but instead an interwoven cloth, from kindergarteners harvesting carrots in a school’s raised bed to borscht served at UVM Medical Center.

The current buzzword resilience hums around what’s happening in Hardwick. Farm Connex moves food from farmers to tables, the most elemental and perhaps among the most sacred of human activities. The process respects how interdependence is crucial to of our mortal existence and our ability to thrive. Under the umbrella of the CAE, the work is accomplished with passion and a kind of ferocity that often flies beneath the social radar, aiming for that lofty place of agricultural well-being.

Meyer mused, “Nothing against the Midwest, but are we going to rely on Iowa to grow all our food? How far down will the Colorado River actually dwindle, and how will that affect food production? Will there be another pandemic?

In this place, right here in Hardwick, we’ll have a 20,000-square-foot building, and a community that knows how to grow food and supports it. We’ll have each other. This isn’t about dread, but it’s 2024.

When we’re looking 50 years down the road, this might not be a bad place to land.”—Brett Stanciu

CAE

CAE’s Farm Connex team loading up for a delivery.

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any Septembers ago I used to run marathons. I wasn’t fast, nor could my thick frame ever be characterized as graceful in its stumbling, forward motion. I used to say the “journey” – training, diet, health benefits, and camaraderie – was more important than the race itself. I was right.

Most marathons are scheduled for autumn or spring, when it’s cooler. You sign up well in advance, which provides time for training. If done properly, it takes 12 to 16 weeks in advance of the 26.2-mile trek to prepare your body for the hours of pounding it will need to endure. That’s months of running – a real commitment. It becomes a lifestyle.

Depending on your race choice, you are either running through the summer or through the winter. I only ever chose one spring marathon, 269

opting instead for half-marathons then in order to reduce the load for my wintertime trainings. It’s the rare individual who enjoys running hundreds of miles in darkness.

Preparing for fall marathons, and clocking distance through the summer season, has its own set of challenges. You have to consider heat and humidity. You dress less. You sweat more. You need to drop drinks and arrange for breaks with loved ones. You learn quickly that you should do your weekly long runs early. You want to avoid getting caught in an afternoon thunderstorm or a heavy downpour (or hail), where personal safety is an issue. (In the decades since my training regimen, climate change has made those particular challenges even more pronounced.)

Suffice it to say, late June, July, and August

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are the key months for conditioning: the excess weight comes off; lung capacity improves; the pain threshold goes up; and you become attuned to what your body can and cannot do – and what it needs.

Who knew it needed September?

While September often signifies stiff blue jeans, fresh notebooks, and a flashy new backpack for school, smart runners will tell you it’s maybe the best month of the year for running. In one September month of training, my partner Christina and I sought out scenic places to run around Vermont – back roads, bike paths, cemeteries, trails, anywhere we could soak up the cool air while taking in the natural beauty of our state.

Winter has its merits, but it’s monochromatic, mostly. Summer, too, has a lush allure. Spring is just muddy, and dreary, at least until spring foliage starts to bud out.

September is pre-foliage, but the Bob Ross fine hints are there. The high-pressure, cooler air blows in with those ominous slate gray clouds; goldenrod fills the edges of roads, seemingly highlighting the way ahead.

The sunlight is softer – longer again in morning and evening – casting magnificent shadows while lovely breezes allow the old growth to applaud your effort. September sunsets are magic in their contrast of darkness and fire-bright edges.

Apples – some worthy of snatching during a roadside break – are weighing down the branches of old trees. And the crab apples, little ankle twisters if you’re not paying attention, litter the roads and trails for the impending autumn harvest among the critter-sphere.

And, oh, the bounty of September. That corn that was knee-high on your steamy July 4 run creates a tunnel by September, a magnificent runway that dares you not to raise your arms in victory or wave at the cheering crowd.

Sun-kissed families living along the rolling back roads are desperate to get in their midseason harvest, especially as groundhogs and deer look on with a gluttonous glee. The turkey hens are nearly done guiding their chicks around the long fields, their little heads bobbing along just about the time for the fourth cut of the season.

They are nearly ready to head off.

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Week after week, woodpiles dumped in driveways somehow disappear into nearby outbuildings or cellars – with occupants eager to don a sweater or sweatshirt and light up the wood stove to take off the morning’s edge. But it’s still too early. You almost have to remind yourself, it’s still summer for most of the month.

After many of our runs, Christina and I would stop to watch her daughter playing soccer with her high school team, the warm sun on our shoulders; the distant trees signaling the change in temperature with dots of yellow and maybe even an early maple showing off its reds. Lily and the girls were so full of spirit.

Was it in the air, this energy? Maybe it’s all of those apples. Maybe it’s the many piles of split wood. Maybe it’s simply that release from the oppressive, humid air of summer. But there’s a welcome sweetness out there, and runners, in particular, suck it in. In September, it carries them for extra miles they did not know they had in them; it lifts their inspiration.

For the runner, that’s important. September is that critical month where marathoners, in particular, are taking on their longest training runs, some of them stretching 18 or 20 miles and lasting three or four hours. That’s a lot of time to look around, to self-reflect, to ponder mysteries or problem-solve.

But when your body is that conditioned, and you are feeling that confident, a long run to mark the close of summer is an extraordinary feat. You thrive on it: Lungs feel large and full; legs feel strong; the ache of these hard runs totally feels worth every step. You’re in love.

Our rural landscape is a remarkable playground.

Our backroads connect us to a Vermont that needs to be seen again and redescribed every season.

They say change is good. Seems fair and accurate.

Before the wood stove door creaks open, and the lines of the horizon take precedence again, we have one month that is its own journey. It prepares us for the next season and beyond. September conditions us to follow our hearts, even if the journey takes us hither and yon to the beautiful places we might not even know were there.

That’s the win, no? —Steven Pappas

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Just Gorgeous

t rained twice in September in much of the state – the rest of the month was like weather in a movie, especially as the leaves started to turn. We’re sure it wasn’t good for everyone – a farmer down the road had plowed and seeded a hayfield, and then birds of all sorts picked at the seed for what seemed like weeks before there was rain to help the seed germinate. He must have been looking at the sky and thinking: really? But for most of us it was just lovely. Dry weather in September comes largely guilt free. The farming and gardening season is largely over, so there’s no need to irrigate. The trees have, for the most part, done what they need to do for the year, so you don’t worry about them like you do when it’s dry in May. The sun and low humidity keep molds and mildews at bay, which allows perennial beds to look a month younger than they actually are.

If you were behind on your firewood this year you had the opportunity to catch up and let the sun cauterize the freshly split wood before putting it under cover. All the getting-ready-forfall-chores – the chimney cleaning, and window caulking, and roof repairing – unfolded under Bahamian blue skies. The wild purple asters seemed especially prolific and gorgeous, so that color was ubiquitous, too.

The month ended up warmer than normal, which is getting so redundant that it probably doesn’t need to be said. It was a(nother) top-10 warmest September in Burlington – 7 of the top 10 warmest of these months have occurred in the past decade. But there wasn’t anything extreme about the heat. No heatwaves. The nights were warm and there was no hint of frost – the very coldest spots might have hit 39 on a few nights,

while most places stayed in the 40s and 50s – but you didn’t really notice that one way or the other. The weather on a phone app looked like the weather they get in California – highs in the 70s, lows in the 50s, a full sun icon every day for 10 days. Someone noted that fall seemed to track with the Equinox this year, which was September 22. It was full-on summer right up to that point, after which a stretch of close-toseasonal weather, the low light, and the colorchanging mountains made it feel like that really was the first day of fall.

The placid weather stood in sharp contrast to what was unfolding in other parts of the world.

As the month neared its end, news from the south brought word of Hurricane Helene and the damage it wrought. An estimated 40 trillion gallons of water fell in that storm – that’s the entire estimated volume of Lake Champlain almost six times over. When it hit mountainous areas in the southern Appalachians, it was devastating. Your heart broke for the people and their struggles. And yet it was hard not to react with exasperation when leaders referred to the storm as “unthinkable” and “unimaginable.” While Hurricane Helene was destroying parts of the southeast, a different storm system, on the other side of the world, was dropping 27.5 inches of rain on Nepal. A week earlier, whole swaths of central Europe were drowned under 20plus inches of rain. In July, in Vermont, well … you’ve already read about that. There are plenty of adjectives that can be used to describe these floods that are intensified by the excess moisture in the atmosphere, but if you’re paying even a little bit of attention to climatic events these days, you know that “unthinkable” is not one of them.

We looked back at our weather summaries from the past four volumes of Vermont Almanac and saw that September 2023 was similar to this month – we called it the nicest stretch of weather we’d had all year. September 2022 was wet, September 2021 was balanced, September 2020 was cold and dry.

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JENNIFER THYGESEN / TUNBRIDGE WORLD’S FAIR

Sunny, warm conditions prevailed for most of the month, including on September 14, 2024, for the “cavalcade of livestock” at The Tunbridge World’s Fair. stor ie s f r om & f or t h e l an d

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MARY HOLLAND

Black and yellow argiope web and stabilimenta

ertain spiders, most of which are diurnal orb weavers, create zigzag silk designs on their webs called stabilimenta. Stabilimentum may be a single zigzag line, a combination of lines, or even a spiral whorl in the web’s center.

Theories abound as to the function of these adornments. Originally they were thought to stabilize the web (because they are so loosely attached to the web, this theory no longer holds water). It was also thought that because silk reflects UV light, it might be an enhanced way of attracting insects, but stabilimenta are not sticky, so that theory is also questionable.

Spiders that incorporate stabilimenta into their webs build their webs out in the open, during the day, and don’t rebuild their web every day. Nocturnal spiders and spiders that make webs in more secluded areas seem not to have stabilimenta. And diurnal spiders that remake their web every day don’t have them either. Much time and energy is expended spinning a web, and research shows that webs that have stabilimenta are, for the most part, avoided by birds. Thus, the prevailing theory is that stabilimenta are a kind of billboard that make birds aware of webs containing them. —Mary Holland

cow parsnips are

often more than eight feet tall. The flower heads, in the same style as other members of the carrot family, are big – up to 12 inches across. The hollow stems that I opened up here were sheltering at least four different insect species in differing phases: larvae, pupae, and a lot of scurrying adult earwigs.

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this broadwing hawk

was found injured in Wells River this summer, the victim of some sort of blunt force trauma, and brought to the Vermont Institute of Natural Sciences in Quechee.

Grae O’Toole, lead wildlife keeper at VINS, said that the number of broadwing hawks brought to VINS this year was the most they’ve ever seen. Overall numbers were up, too. On September 1, they’d seen more than 1,000 birds from all corners of the state.

DANA CECCARELLI GINA AURIEMA

this star pat tern the transformation that slime molds go through

as they progress from slime to structurally complex organisms is astonishing, and so is the speed at which this occurs. This photo shows a slime mold in the genus Stemonitis – not long before this there was just yellow slime oozing across the ground, a one-celled, amoebalike organism with thousands of nuclei. It’s recently been determined that slime molds are not fungi, but something quite different. stor ie s f r om & f or t h e l an d

on the forest floor is

a former white pine stump.

The rest of the stump has decayed, and only the resinrich limb whorls remain.

According to forest forensicist Tom Wessels, it takes around 70 years for this to happen.

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Zombie Weed

s September arrives, I’m planning my next stage of attack. So, let me tell you the story of this unhinged, yearslong war against a small patch of invasive knotweed (and my vision to build a salt-and-pepper shaker museum in a trolley on its deathbed) and how one specialist told me I should probably just chill out.

I first spotted the plant after my husband and I bought our home in a residential White River Junction neighborhood eight years ago.

Resembling bamboo with emerald pointed oval leaves, Fallopia japonica – known as Japanese knotweed – produces small white flowers that one magazine described as “pretty.” Once you see it, you can’t miss it, due to its omnipresence along Vermont’s riverbanks and roadways.

Perhaps it’s not quite that widespread, but close. “In Vermont,” according to the state’s Fish & Wildlife Department, “knotweed covers miles of shoreline on every major river in the state.”

It’s a member of the state’s Noxious Weed Quarantine list, which basically means it’s an unwelcome bully. Knotweed chokes out native plants, especially in wet or disturbed soil, hurting bugs that eat the natives, which in turn hurts wildlife that eat the bugs.

Another concern is riverbank stability, surely heightened in this flood-ravaged era. “Rivers and streams also face an increased erosion risk from uncontrolled knotweed populations,” the wildlife department says. “The ground beneath dense growths of knotweed rarely supports other vegetation, leaving the bare soil very susceptible to erosion.”

My initial concern was considerably less consequential. The knotweed was blocking my view.

During my morning coffee, I like to gaze past the plot at the end of our yard, admiring my neighbors’ gardens or the occasional dog out for its morning walk, owner in tow. The bamboo-ey stuff – which 275

I didn’t know much about – was interrupting. We mowed the patch, the size of a camper van, once or twice in the first few years, sometimes annoyed but with a firm grip on proportionality.

Yet when the patch returned year after year, and seemed in fact to expand, I did what every homeowner does: a Google search. And that’s when I freaked.

Remember the magazine that called the knotweed’s flowers “pretty”? That was Southern Living in a 2021 article under the headline, “Why Japanese Knotweed Instills Terror in The Heart of Any Gardener.” My search yielded a parade of similarly scary titles, followed by descriptions of the “extremely tenacious” plant and its “zombielike refusal to die.”

I was disturbed by claims of knotweed’s power to disrupt not only gardens and walkways, but driveways and building foundations. I skipped the parts that threw those findings into doubt, as I was frenzied to read that lenders in the U.K. consider the plant so problematic that its presence might impact a homebuyer’s ability to get a loan. Yowza!

Every website seemed to offer different advice, but most conveyed an uphill battle I was likely to lose. Some said the danger was overhyped and suggested mowing would work – as long as we were consistent year after year, which we hadn’t been. Others warned that approach was perilous, convincing me that our mower would spread the weed’s wrath. Several said I should eat the stuff. (“Tastes like rhubarb!”)

I was uninterested in pie or graduality. Instead, I tried every suggestion at once: cutting the stalks and pouring poison down their throats; shoveling out the rhizomes, which my research led me to believe were magical sources of resurrective powers; staking huge swaths of quarter-inch wire, meant to sap energy from weeds that tried to poke through; and covering the whole mess with v e r mon t al m anac | vol u m e v

heavy-duty tarps, denying it sunlight. I tiptoed barefooted through the yard to wash my shoes, shears, and shovels, convinced that a micron of misplaced rhizome would sprout a new patch.

The tarps, of course, were ugly. In a strange attempt at beautification, I topped them with green astroturf and a bright blue wooden trolley built on a trailer, which I bought off Facebook from a guy who lives in a homemade castle in rural New Hampshire. I imagined the trolley could one day house my concerningly increasing salt-andpepper-shaker collection (perhaps this gives you a sense of my propensity for obsessive behavior), but also the trolley drew the eye upward. The morning dogs were intrigued, but I’m sure their owners thought I’d lost the thread.

Who cares! I thought. Surely this could work.

Not even close. If anything, I seemed to provoke the plot’s expansion, as new stalks sprouted beyond the tarps. Some poked through the center, undeterred by the wire mesh. When I peeked underneath a few springs later, I understood the “zombie” reference, finding a squiggly mass that resembled huge albino worms. I lobbed a few more cutting attacks, but they were futile. The

trolley sat unused, weeds gathering around it.

Devastated, last year I tracked down a couple of New England knotweed removal experts. One, who does battle for the likes of land trusts and governments, was surprised to learn I was calling about eight by ten yards instead of acres. He had a lot of practical advice, but after he listened to my saga, his central question startled me. In essence, he asked: Have you considered giving it a rest?

The patch is far from any waterbodies or buildings. Maybe, he suggested, I could learn to manage it instead of demanding to destroy it.

Maybe we could even coexist. I’ve lost my notes from that phone call, but I know his suggestions included the word “Zen.” Interesting proposition, I thought, the twitch fading from my eye. And indeed, I ratcheted down the knotweed war, ignoring the plot for most of last summer. My husband recently helped me move the trolley in preparation to paint it, the first step in its museum rebirth.

But I also painted poison on the knotweed leaves last September, and I think I’ll do that again this month. When it comes to zombies, I figure Zen will only get you so far. —Maggie Cassidy

MAGGIE CASSIDY

Taking attention off the knotweed patch. stor ie s f r om & f or t h e l an d

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Stored Sunshine t my house, September is the height of tomato canning season. A phalanx of jars filled with sauce is my hedge against

winter.

Canning doesn’t require much equipment – a canning kettle with a rack, a wide-mouth funnel, a jar lifter – but it does require flexibility, stamina, and heat tolerance. Like most agricultural pursuits, canning follows nature’s timetable, not one driven by a clock. When the berries ripen, they have to be picked; once picked, they have to be eaten or processed. Putting food up becomes the taskmaster of summer, beginning with carrying my enamel kettle up from the basement at the solstice and making jam when the rhubarb and strawberries come in. Jamming continues into July when red and black raspberries ripen. The rest of July is all about pickles, as the cucumbers and green beans cascade from their vines. In good years, August means putting up peaches. But the 277

glory days come in September, when the paste tomatoes come in.

I grew up in mid-century suburbia, where our pantry was stocked with iconic red and white cans.

When I moved from Manhattan to Newfane in my late twenties, I’d never grown a tomato, let alone safely sealed one in a glass jar. When I arrived in Vermont, all I knew about canning was what I’d learned from Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, a novel whose characters were influential: I wanted to be a writer like Jo, a pianist like Beth, a world traveler like Amy, and a housewife with a “storeroom stocked with homemade preserves,” like Meg. Unlike Meg, I had the clear instructions of the Ball Blue Book Guide to Home Canning, Freezing & Dehydration to guide me.

Canning tomatoes has become an annual ritual for me – one that starts in January, when I order seeds. The seeds are sown indoors in February; the seedlings move to the greenhouse in April; they’re v e r mon t al m anac | vol u m e v

transplanted to the garden in June, where they’re nurtured to fruitful maturity. I mostly can heirloom varieties of plum tomatoes, unless we’re oppressed with more ripe slicers than we can eat, even on an all-tomato diet. In that case, I seal tomato juice in jars – a real, mid-winter treat. Mostly, I put up quarts of whole tomatoes and pints of plain sauce.

In September, there’s always a saucepot simmering on the back of the stove. There’s usually a pan of tomatoes with garlic and hot peppers in the oven as well, for a roasted sauce that will add pizzazz to mid-winter pizza. Once the pantry shelves are stocked, I reduce sauce into paste, and some I season as ketchup, a sublime condiment unlike anything store bought. I once fantasized about never having to buy anything at the supermarket, by growing and preserving all of my family’s food. In reality, I garner enormous satisfaction from growing and putting up tomatoes. I confess to also owning a chest freezer, where the meat birds raised on our pasture spend the winter, and there’s room for venison in case I take a deer.

Tomatoes are an acid fruit, so they can be sealed in a hot-water bath, which calls for boiling water to skin the tomatoes, sterilize the jars, and seal them. I began canning in an antique cape equipped with a stove in the backhouse, adjacent

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to the kitchen. We canned outdoors on a gas ring at our new home, until we installed an exhaust fan in the kitchen and moved indoors. Even in this relative luxury, the hours at the sink and stove leave my hands raw and my feet aching; the steam from the kettle amplifies the humidity of summer’s last hurrah. Canning is hot work. But that’s where the poetry lies: I’m never just putting tomatoes in jars. I’m storing sunshine.

September is the bittersweet fulcrum between summer’s exuberance and autumn’s sobriety, and the best days arc from chilly mornings that call for long sleeves, to hot afternoons beckoning me to the river for another “last” swim of the season.

But September days inevitably shorten as the earth tilts away from the sun. Toward the end of the month, we harvest the green tomatoes in anticipation of frost. Mixed with sugar and spice, these unripe tomatoes become exotic chutney, vegetarian mincemeat, and sweet marmalade – perfect for holiday feasting and gifts. After the holidays and the bluebird days of winter, when the snow shrinks from the stone walls and gray skies hem me indoors – days when I itch to be back in the garden – that’s when I bring canned tomatoes up from the basement and open a jar of September sun. —Deborah Lee Luskin

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Life at Vermont’s “Poor Farms”

t’s an odd photograph. The people, thrown together by happenstance and bad luck, gather beside a farmhouse they don’t own.

Four women stand formally in a line, hands clasped at their waists. Other women, most of them younger, stand on the porch above, keeping their children focused on the camera. Men mostly inhabit the fringes of the photo, sitting in pairs and standing alone.

This is the face of poverty in Vermont as it appeared at the turn of the last century. These are the residents of the Sheldon Poor Farm in the year 1912. If they are like other poor farm residents, many of them will live out their days on this property. Those who can, will work.

Those who are too infirm will spend their days wandering the grounds or talking or reading the castoff books and magazines that have collected in the farmhouse.

Poor farms had been a fixture on the Vermont landscape for a century when the photo was taken. They would remain a fixture for more than another half century, until the last poor farm – this one, in fact – closed in 1968. Today, the only reminder of them is the many Poor Farm Roads that still dot the state.

Poor farms started almost as soon as Vermont did. In 1797, the Legislature of the young state passed a law requiring that “every town and place in this state, shall relieve, support and maintain their own poor.” The idea that towns should care for their own was nothing new. New England colonies had operated on that principle. They had imported the idea from England, where the practice had been put into statute as part of the Elizabethan Poor Laws during the early 1600s. The Vermont law caused strife between communities, in part because the law required towns to keep their poor inhabitants from “strolling into any other town or place.”

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Initially, towns contracted out the work of caring for their poorest residents. The town would assign these unfortunates to the care of whomever promised to care for them for the lowest fee. This system, however, proved inadequate in the face of the economic troubles that rocked Vermont and the rest of the nation in its early days. After a series of economic panics and depressions, Vermont communities suddenly needed to find a way to care for large numbers of poor people.

They hit on the idea of poor farms.

Burlington opened its first poor house in 1816, and later its own poor farm. Middlebury established a poor house in 1822 and three years later purchased land for a poor farm. In 1834, St. Albans, Swanton, Sheldon, and Fairfield pooled their resources to buy the 150-acre parcel that became the Sheldon Poor Farm and hired a farming couple to run the place. Soon most Vermont communities had established their own poor farms.

If depressions and panics set off the first series of poor farms, another series sprang up during the 1840s and ’50s in order to handle the influx of destitute Irish immigrants fleeing the potato famine in their country.

In 1850, the state had 1,878 people in poor farms and poor houses. Of these, nearly twothirds were classified as disabled in some way – 140 were blind, 148 were either “deaf or dumb,” 299 were termed “idiots,” and 560 were physically injured. The remainder were presumably either elderly or able-bodied and unemployed. The ablebodied people would live at the farm for a winter, then leave in the spring in hopes of finding better prospects.

The presence of people with undiagnosed mental illness, and the way they were treated, had a profound impact on life on the state’s poor farms. A visitor to Hartford’s poor farm during v e r mon t al m anac | vol u m e v

the mid-1800s described the appearance of three residents: “These men were raving crazy most of the time, and there, caged up like wild beasts in narrow filthy cells, the writer … was impressed that the inhuman treatment to which they were subjected was sufficient of itself to make lunatics of all men.”

Poor farm residents were usually called “inmates.” If the word implied guilt, it was no accident. Most poor people were regarded as deserving of their condition. Exceptions were made for the “worthy poor,” who were physically unfit for labor.

Residents were often treated much like prisoners.

The 1797 poor-relief law allowed overseers to whip inmates for misbehaving. At some poor farms, overseers would withhold food from misbehaving residents. Overseers were encouraged to set a moral tone at the farm. The sexes were strictly segregated when they slept and during meals, and residents were encouraged to attend church services. If they didn’t go to church, they were at least expected to observe the Sabbath quietly.

Since poor farms were local solutions, conditions varied widely between them. Much depended on the character of the overseer. At their worst, overseers could seem like cruel characters straight out of Dickens. At their best, overseers could seem

like guardian angels. During the early 1900s, Barre City had a kindly overseer, who willed his house to the city to serve as a home for the poor.

Poor farms began to close in the early 1900s as people began to trust the farms’ functions to specialized organizations, institutions, and government agencies. The Great Depression of the 1930s only accelerated the federal funding of relief organizations. In response, poor farms began to close across the state. Hartland closed its poor farm in 1938. Others soon followed suit: Stowe (1948), Brattleboro (1951), Bennington (1953), Montpelier (1956), St. Johnsbury (1958), Burlington (1958), Middlebury (1959), and Rutland (1966).

Eventually, the legislature decided to end the last remnants of the state’s poor farm system. In 1967, it passed the Social Welfare Act, which removed the towns’ responsibility to care for the poor and with it their right to run poor farms.

The move was intended to remove what was seen by many as an embarrassingly antiquated system. In the years since its demise, however, the poor farm has found new supporters. Some Vermont lawmakers have gone so far as to propose reinstating the system. The poor farm may never live again, but one idea won’t die: that at some level we should take care of our own. —Mark Bushnell

SHELDON HISTORICAL SOCIETY

Sheldon Poor Farm, 1912. stor ie s f r om & f or t h e l an d

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Building a Family Beef Farm

hen you hear “family farm,” it’s often in the context of an operation that started decades or even centuries ago and has been repeatedly taken over by subsequent generations. But every family farm has to start sometime, and John “Peter” Trono, my brother, started his in 2010. Fat Cow Farm in East Charlotte may be just 14 years old, but it’s a farm where family steps in and steps up whenever needed, just as has happened on Vermont farms forever.

Peter was nearing retirement age when he had a mid-life crisis of sorts and thought it would be fun to start a farm. His two eldest sons, Luke and Derek, had taken over management of the construction business he had inherited from his father. He was thinking about the next chapter of his life – a way to keep busy and stay relevant.

In that process, he was inspired by his youngest son Zach’s passion for agriculture. Zach was always interested in farming, and as soon as he

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learning , diversifying , consolidating

Zach bolstered what he’d learned at school by reading, talking to fellow beef farmers, and getting advice from neighboring farms and various farm services about the animals, growing hay and GMO-free corn, harvesting crops, and anything else that came up. The local community was especially helpful, and he took advantage of any assistance that was offered.

Peter, pretty well aware that he didn’t know a whole lot about farming, also relished learning and getting input and ideas from other farmers.

While in pursuit of more farming knowledge, he stor ie s f r om & f or t h e l an d

FAT COW FARM

was old enough, worked weekends and after school on a local farm.

(He once got in trouble because he had a jackknife in his pocket at school, which he needed for cutting baling twine at his afterschool job.) When Zach reached high school, he studied at the Essex Technical Center, where the curriculum included agriculture.

With hands-on knowledge and some ag education, he was well prepared to start farming when he graduated.

The timing worked out well, as shortly before that Peter was able to purchase 82 acres of prime agricultural land on Bingham Brook Road in East Charlotte. It already had some infrastructure in place and fields that needed to be grazed. There it was: a hobby for Peter and a job for Zach.

The father and son team began building Fat Cow Farm (Mucca Grassa Agricola in Italian). The family connection was furthered when, around this same time, Peter’s daughter-in-law’s grandparents were looking to re-home some Highland cattle. So this herd moved from Huntington to Charlotte to graze down the land and help start the farm. The Highlands were soon traded for a small herd of Herefords, which included a bull. With this herd, hard work, and high hopes, the farm started a breeding program and began to produce organic beef for local markets.

Peter Trono (center) with son Zach and grandson Parker, in 2016. learned about Wagyu, a Japanese beef cattle breed that had become popular among beef-eaters.

Peter purchased two Wagyu bulls and started breeding them with his Herefords to produce what is known as American-style Kobe beef.

While the focus remained on beef, the farm also diversified. They added chickens, pigs, and, for a while, Dorper sheep, which they processed mainly for the local Muslim community. In the fall, turkeys were purchased from Dream Walker Farm in South Hero for finishing and selling at Thanksgiving. After a few years of battling foxes and other predators like coyotes and bobcats, and struggling to convince goats and sheep to respect their fence line, the farm’s livestock consolidated and became what it is today: a herd of hybrid Wagyu cows along with hogs. When ready, the cows are brought to Bear Trap Custom Processing in Milton and the pigs are taken to Maple Ridge Meats in Benson to be processed, packaged, and frozen. friends and family

Around 2013, Peter built the Fat Cow Farm General Store on the property. It opened in early 2015, with products from the local community as well as the farm’s own meat and maple products.

Peter’s wife, Wendy, and his daughter-in-law, Genevieve (Luke’s wife), took over operation of

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the store, but Peter could usually be found there, cooking for family and friends who would stop by to hang out. It didn’t take long for friends to start gathering on the front porch – or around the wood stove – to solve the world’s problems, and maybe share stories and a beer or two. On any given Monday, Wednesday, or Friday afternoon you might find them gathered there.

Peter passed away unexpectedly on February 2, 2024, at the age of 73. And, like other family farms, family and friends stepped up to keep the operation going. In the immediate aftermath of Peter’s passing, his good friend, Steve Mack, jumped in to keep the farm store open until the family could get their feet back on the ground. He even kept the “gathers” going – they were needed more than ever at that time.

And like those before them, this modern family farm has come to depend even more on the support of the whole family. Zach has totally taken over day-to-day farm operations: feeding, watering, moving animals, haying the fields, stocking the freezers in the farm store, mowing and maintaining around the farm. Derek has taken on many of the tasks that Peter had done: billing, setting up processing dates, cut sheets, accounts receivable, and more. Luke helps with a

GENEVIEVE TRONO

A regular gathering of friends and neighbors at the Fat Cow Farm store in Charlotte.

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little of all of the above, and also drives to Benson and Milton to pick up processed meat. Even Peter’s grandsons help out. Everyone has a role.

The three brothers all now live on the farm property, 60 acres of which has been conserved through the Vermont Land Trust. And the learning continues: What surprised the Tronos most was the continuing balancing act around the size of the herd. “We walk the line between maintaining a herd large enough to meet the demand of our farm store and restaurant customers, while also keeping in mind that a larger herd means more grazing area in the summer, more winter feed, and more room in barns and bunkers when the cows are tucked away during winter,” explains Luke Trono. The numbers are always somewhat in flux; while some cows head to the slaughterhouse, others are being born.

The Tronos are justifiably proud of the high quality meat produced at Fat Cow Farm. As the farm and the family adapts after Peter’s passing, the current plan is to maintain the status quo.

“The general consensus within the family is to prioritize getting our feet beneath us. Right now, the herd size, production, and our product range all feel manageable,” says Luke. “Moving forward has truly been a team effort.” —Gina Auriema v e r mon t al m anac | vol u m e v

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agyu is a Japanese breed of cattle.

Wa = Japanese,

Gyu = cow.

In Japan, there are four breeds or strains that are considered Wagyu: Japanese black (most common), red, shorthorn, and polled.

According to the American

Wagyu Wagyu Association, only the black and the red were exported out of Japan and it is these strains that have been crossbred with US cattle – most often with black Angus.

In Japan, the breeding of Wagyu cattle is highly regulated and only the best genetics are kept for breeding;

they are considered a national treasure and are treated as such, so in 1997 the Japanese government banned further exports. Since then, Americanstyle Wagyu beef has grown in popularity. The meat from the American Wagyu, with the characteristics of Japanese Wagyu, is uniformly pink, with a more integrated blend of meat and fat and is high in healthier unsaturated fats.

Kobe beef, some-times mistakenly thought to be beef from any Wagyu breed, is produced only in one prefecture in Japan under very strict regulations. Very little is exported. In fact, only eight restaurants in the US serve real Kobe beef. In the US, the beef available from Wagyu cross breeding is occasionally referred to as Kobe-style beef, but is correctly called American Wagyu beef.

—Gina Auriema

WENDY TRONO

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Skin Care Secret

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allow is rendered beef suet. Suet is rendered raw fat, collected from around the kidneys/loins of the cow. Before the petrochemical boom of synthetic surfactants, tallow was commonly used in skin care, candle making, and cooking. In the 1970s, saturated fats were demonized and many people switched to highly processed vegetable oils. But there is currently a resurgence of tallow in the mainstream, in cooking and in skincare.

Why incorporate tallow into your skin care routine? Tallow is filled with fat-soluble vitamins A, D, E, and K, along with B-12. It’s also very versatile, so it can be used for most skin types.

And it is a shelf-stable product without any preservatives.

I started incorporating tallow in my skin care a few years ago, so when we switched over to raising beef at Woodard’s Farm, it was a no-brainer to keep the beef suet and start experimenting. The first few batches I made were awful! With plenty

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of trial and error, though, I was able to dial in some lovely products. Today my tallow products are the most popular selling items in my online apothecary, Loomis Hill Botanics.

Here’s a quick guide on how to render tallow if you want to try this yourself. You’ll need quality beef suet, sourced from a local farm or butcher.

And a Crock-pot/stock pot, mesh strainer, slotted spoon, spatula, water, salt, and a container.

There are two common methods of melting suet: wet rendering (adding water) and dry rendering (nothing added). I render twice: first with the wet method and the second time with the dry process. It’s easier working with cold (but not frozen) tallow, so I’ll often pull tallow from the freezer and put it in the fridge the night before I render. tallow rendering instructions :

Take cold suet out of the packaging and cut into 1- to 1.5-inch chunks. Add suet chunks to a Crock or stock pot and add a pint of water and a handful of salt; cook on low for a few hours, until melted.

Use a slotted spoon to take out any bits of meat.

Place a mesh strainer over the pot and strain into a bowl. Once cool, take the tallow out of the container; if it’s in a wide bowl it can generally pop out in one piece with a little pressure. Water and salt will be separated at the bottom. Take a spatula or kitchen knife and gently scrape any impurities from the bottom of the tallow and discard. Cut tallow into chunks and render again, this time without any water and salt (dry method) for a few hours. Strain into a container and cool. The tallow is now ready to use! —Suzanne Woodard Note: You can add additional ingredients to your tallow skin care product to give it a pleasing color and smell. Some of the herb-infused blends offered by Loomis Hill Botanics include lavender and white pine, chamomile and rose, and balsam fir and frankincense. v e r mon t al m anac | vol u m e v

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what is a whole , half ,

or quarter beef share ?

Bulk beef, or a beef share, is often available as a “whole,” “half ” (also known as a “side”), or “quarter.” Whole and half beef shares are typically custom cut according to your preferences. You’ll be asked to fill out a cut sheet specifying your choices for package size, boneless vs. bone-in cuts, steaks vs. roasts, stew vs. ground.

Your farmer can help walk you through the best options based on your family size and cooking preferences. Quarter shares are often a standard mix of cuts from the whole animal. stor ie s f r om & f or t h e l an d

DAHLIA DILL

uying local beef in bulk is a great way to stock up the freezer with your favorite cuts, typically for a better price than buying individual cuts over time. If you like the idea, but have felt intimidated by the unknown, there are a few simple concepts to remember that make bulk or beef share purchasing a breeze.

It’s important to remember that each farm can have different processes, procedures, prices, and animal sizes; this information is based on how we do things at Chandler Pond Farm. Be sure to check with your farmer on the details of their offerings before making a purchase. And it’s always a good idea to ask if your farmer offers individual cuts or samples to be sure you enjoy the beef before investing in a larger quantity.

Buying Beef in Bulk

What a quarter beef share looks like a Chandler Pond Farm. price : Typically, the price you

pay for a beef share is based on the hanging weight of the animal: that is the weight of the carcass after it has been dressed, but before it has been aged, cut, or frozen. The hanging weight is usually about 60 percent of the animal’s live weight. You won’t know the exact hanging weight of your beef until it has gone to the butcher, but your farmer should be able to give you an estimated range based on their typical yields.

Be sure to ask if the price of your beef share includes processing fees. Some farms’ pricing is all-inclusive, but sometimes you may be asked to pay the farmer for the

beef itself, and the butcher for the processing/packaging separately, which can add anywhere from $1 to $1.50 per pound of hanging weight to your total cost. how much beef

should i expect ?

Packaged meat yield is normally 60 to 65 percent of the hanging weight, depending on the cuts you choose (bonein vs. boneless, whether you keep the organs and fat). how much freezer space will i need ?

A half beef share will require 8 to 10 cubic feet; a quarter will take 4 to 5 cubic feet.

example calculation for a side of beef .

Note: Price, hanging weight, and yield can vary depending on the farm and animal.

Hanging weight for a half beef. . ........................................... 350 pounds Price per pound hanging weight (including processing). . ............... $6 Total price for half beef (350 pounds x $6)................................ $2,100 Packaged meat yield (350 pounds x 60 percent)............... 210 pounds Total price per pound of packaged beef ($2,100/210)...... $10 pound —Dahlia Dill

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