Some University of Vermont students kicked off this year's sugaring season by tapping on-campus trees for sap, plus touring the oldest maple research center in the world. That's thanks to the UVM Maple Club and UVM Ag Club.

Both clubs are affiliated with the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, and both are nearing their first full academic year. To get more students involved, the clubs have been holding joint events — like the tour at Proctor Maple Research Center on March 1.

Nearly two dozen participants showed up in Underhill on a cold, sunny Sunday to walk through snowy sugarbush on the slope of Mount Mansfield.

“We’re just trying to connect more the students with the agriculture in Vermont, the farms,” said UVM Ag Club officer and sophomore Agustina Montedonico.

“Seeing [maple] more as agriculture I think is really interesting, I’ve kind of always seen it as a separate thing,” said sophomore and fellow Ag Club officer Kellianne Walsh.

During the tour, students listened to a presentation by Director of Scientific Research Tim Rademacher. He spoke about maple tree biology and sugarbush ecology; the global industry market; production trends over time; the equipment and climate needed for making syrup; the center’s collaborations with UVM Extension on testing syrup quality for producers; the fact that all the maple syrup in UVM dining halls comes from Proctor.

And should they want to learn more, Rademacher told students about his fall course, “Maple Sugaring In A Changing Environment.”

“We have a little bit of sessions on campus to prepare things, but then you actually make some syrup out here, you run some lateral lines, you tap some trees, you learn the entire process, from the ecosystem and the health, all the way to the final product and the quality side of things,” he said. “The class is supposed to prepare those that wanted to come back in the spring and actually work with us on specific research projects out here.”

At least one of the attending students was potentially interested in the class. More appreciated the chance to check out the research center operations in person, and to connect with each other.

“It’s a really cool opportunity to meet people who are also interested in what I’m interested in,” said Max Cohen, a freshman Sustainability, Ecology, and Policy major. “I have a lot of background and hopes for the future in farming, and so it’s nice to kind of bring that together, even if it’s not what I’m studying.”

Though Cohen noted that after attending Ag Club and Maple Club events, he decided to add an Agroecology minor, “to really get that experience.”

— Elodie Reed, Communications Manager, UVM Extension

It’s 4:30 a.m., and I’m sitting on the couch by the woodstove, drinking coffee, putting off walking down the hill to the sugarhouse to get started on the day. If it were even a week ago, lingering wouldn’t have been possible. The adrenaline would have had me out there. Worries about this or that. But we’re nearing the end of the season now, and the adrenaline has waned enough that I can afford this grace.

Technically speaking, it’s been a solid sugaring season in southwestern Vermont. Tapping was difficult on account of deep snow, and things started later than usual. But my sense is that most sugarmakers are pleased with where they stand, production wise. The past few seasons have been off by around 25% here, so it’s nice to make a crop, or more than a crop in some cases. Of course in more northern areas they’re still going – at least I hope they are.

During the first week of March temperatures soared into the 60s and 70s down here, which threatened to doom the season just as it started. But the trees were frozen, and there was enough snow and cold that the microclimates in the sugarbushes stayed cool enough. If we’d had that week of weather during the middle or at the end of March, it would have meant the end of the season. But this year the timing worked out in our favor.

The later start to the season was especially welcomed in my operation. I was given the green light to start putting weight on my surgically repaired ankle on March 4th, and we made our first syrup of the season two days later on March 6th. Looking back on the last decade’s worth of production records shows how unusual a March start is anymore.

Date of First Boil:

• 2016: 2/21

• 2017: 2/20

• 2018: 2/19

• 2019: 2/25

• 2020: 2/24

• 2021: 2/28

• 2022: 2/18

• 2023: 2/13

• 2024: 2/25

• 2025: 3/6

If you were a gambler, you would have pegged our chance of a March start this year at around 10 percent. But despite the odds, the bet hit. The weather this year acted more like 20th century weather, when the season started in March in southwestern Vermont around 75% of the time.

My health issues changed how I saw most things this season. (There’s an old Appalachian folksong that calls out in the refrain: “there is a light at the edge of a shadow, there is a light;” it’s an abstractly nice lyric until you live it, and then it sounds like wisdom delivered from on high.) In early February I developed blood clots in my leg, and they migrated and lodged in my lungs. I was in a hospital bed in Albany, New York, for five days. I kept the lights off all day, because the only way I could see the outside was through the light waxing and waning in the room. What bad luck, you might be tempted to think, until you begin to hear tragic stories about people who die from pulmonary embolisms, and then you think: what great luck. This feeling of luck – of light – imbued everything thereafter. I feel so grateful for the friends and family that braved knee-and-thigh deep snow to tap our trees. So grateful for every ounce of syrup we made from that sap.

We had a vacuum pump seize during the first week of the season – these pumps are not inexpensive – and two weeks later a check-valve in the moisture trap failed and the replacement pump inhaled a slug of sap. The veins sheared, and the cylinder filled with burnt sugar that was the consistency of volcanic rock. Picture my father, who at age 77 has lost a certain percentage of his youthful dexterity, and me, peg-leg in a walking boot, trying to settle ourselves down on the muddy earth to work. In past years I would have dwelled on this misfortune; fretted about the economic implications. But this year I was able to sit with the ridiculousness of it all. “I figure two partial us-es add up to one and half men,” joked my father as we groped around blindly for a greasy bolt that fell down under the pump carriage. It’s nuts this sugaring thing. No sane person would submit to the long days and the stress and the uncertainty. But here we were, choosing craziness, which seemed so wonderfully human. It’s such a blessing to be able to make this choice.

It’s supposed to freeze hard in a few days, and I’m not sure if we’ll eek one more run out of the season. But whatever the production numbers end up being, this will end up being the best sugaring season I’ve ever experienced. I hope you other sugarmakers are having a similar run of good luck.

As a final note, I’d like to bring your attention to the film “Sugarhouse.” Filmed in Marlboro, Vermont, it provides an intimate look at some local sugarmakers there. Anyone interested in maple will enjoy this meditation on sugaring and life. It’ll be screening at the Made Here Film Festival in Burlington, on Friday, April 24, at 2:45 p.m. The screening will take place in Lumière Hall at Burlington Beer Company. There will be a statewide regional tour to follow, so check it out when you see it advertised.

– Dave Mance III

As I mentioned in the last post, I’m in the process of healing from a broken ankle. Thanks to all the readers who reached out and wished me well. Early season sugarmaking is an intensely physical endeavor, especially in a deep-snow year like this one. And so the fact that I can’t put any weight on my right foot for another four weeks makes writing a series of dispatches about sugarmaking difficult. My outdoor experiences these days involve sitting with the cat on the couch, both of us looking longingly out the window. (Though I should note that in his case he’s simply choosing not to go out.) I watch friends and family trudge out into the deep snow with tapping drills in hand, and I feel humbled and grateful and blessed. I want to join them with a desire that borders on ache.

What I can do is write about business matters related to sugaring. It’s mind over heart, for sure, but sugarmakers often don’t have the time or the desire to tell these types of stories.

A recent business-related task that got me thinking more broadly about things involved ordering the sign that you see pictured above. You’re probably wondering why we’d want to hang a sign in our sugarhouse that screamed legalese at visitors – it’s the exact opposite of a welcome mat. And the answer is that we don’t. I ordered it because the State of Vermont suggests it’s required on any farm that opens its doors to visitors. In 2021, the legislature passed Act 31, the goal of which was to protect farmers from personal injury lawsuits. And the protections seem contingent on a visitor reading these specific words on this sign. They even suggest you might need more than one of them. (I’m drawing the line at one.)

Here’s the specific language from Act 31:

An agritourism host shall not have a legal duty to protect a participant from the inherent risks of an agritourism activity . . . provided that the agritourism host posts the warning required under section 5873 of this title.

Here’s the required warning, which needs to be in black letters that are at least 1” high; hence the all caps:

WARNING: UNDER VERMONT LAW, AN AGRITOURISM HOST IS NOT LIABLE FOR THE INJURY OR DEATH OF A PARTICIPANT IN AN AGRITOURISM ACTIVITY. INHERENT RISKS INCLUDE THE RISK OF ANIMALS, WEATHER, LAND CONDITIONS, AND THE POTENTIAL FOR YOU AS A PARTICIPANT TO ACT IN A NEGLIGENT WAY THAT MAY CONTRIBUTE TO YOUR OWN INJURY OR DEATH. YOU ARE ASSUMING THE RISK OF PARTICIPATING IN THIS AGRITOURISM ACTIVITY.

If I were king for a day, my first instinct would be to soften the sign’s language. Certainly we could get this point across without making visitors consider their own mortality as they show up to our door, smiling, looking for sugar-on-snow. And certainly we could mandate a font size instead of a letter size, which would allow for a more civilized presentation that didn’t make it seem like every agritourism operation in Vermont was being run by an angry octogenarian who can’t find the CapsLk key. How about something like this?

Farms can be unpredictable places. There are machines here, which can be dangerous. We work with nature here, which is outside of human control. Animals have minds of their own. Weather can change rapidly. Sometimes people break their ankles stepping in holes they didn’t see. The State of Vermont, through Act 31, protects farmers from litigation involving all the ordinary dangers on a farm. As a visitor, you’re assuming the risk of being here.

I wrote that with the idea that I’d replace their 75 words with 75 different words. But after reading it, it seems like 75 words is way too many. Why not simply:

The State of Vermont, through Act 31, protects farmers from litigation involving all the ordinary dangers on a farm. As a visitor, you’re assuming the risk of being here.

Isn’t that much more to the point? And more elegant without two mentions of DEATH? And because it’s less than half the length, maybe we could cut the price of the $40 sign in half?

The point here is not to simply Monday-morning-quarterback bureaucratic, lawyerly writing. Or to shake my tiny fist at our imperfect legal system – in a saner world we wouldn’t need any signage related to this Act, which basically just legalizes common sense. (Yes, if you touch the evaporator, you will get burned.) Instead, the point is to champion writing that’s clear and concise. It’s become fashionable over the last 20 years to criticize the liberal arts education that most of us who grew up in the 20th century received. 21st-century kids, we’re told, need more computer skills and practical knowledge, less Shakespeare and the arts. But while there’s always been this kind of tension between so-called left-brained and right-brained subjects, it’s exacerbated these days by technology that has its thumb on the left-brained scale. These technologies affect all of us, not just school-aged kids. Whether through texting or social media posting that disfavors punctuation, spelling, and any nuance or depth, or the fact that AI is now doing to people’s writing skills what calculators did to their arithmetic skills, the craft of writing is being diminished. And “the craft” doesn’t just refer to the capital-W Writing that professional writers do; “craft” means notes that normal people write to loved ones in birthday and anniversary cards; signs that people use to welcome customers into their place of business; language that makes government and the law accessible to ordinary folks. Writing can seem superficial in the abstract, but it’s a load-bearing beam in any civilized culture.

The positive in all this is that each of us has the power to help write (ha) the ship. How do we ensure that future generations care about reading and writing? By valuing it and practicing it ourselves.

— Dave Mance III

I’ve been reading Paul Kingsnorth’s “Against the Machine, on the Unmaking of Humanity,” a dark, 348-page screed against technology and modern life. Kingsnorth is a crank and he won’t be for everyone; a disillusioned former environmental activist who, in middle-age, embraced orthodox Christianity and an evangelically-apocalyptic mindset about where the machine age is taking us. The book culminates with the suggestion that AI could be the Antichrist that we’re welcoming into the world – he’s not being metaphorical. What makes him worth reading is that his case against modernity is well researched and reasoned. His dark warnings are worth hearing.

Kingsnorth writes very well about place and culture, the bedrock of a natural life that keeps human psyches and the planet in balance. By his telling, modern life, which he calls the machine, seeks deliberately to destroy and replace local culture with a consumerist culture that, like a cancer cell, pursues growth simply for the sake of growing. This paragraph of his could have appeared in the preamble to any volume of Vermont Almanac.

What is a culture? It is a story that a people tells itself . . .. We build and rebuild our cultures every day, in the stories we tell our children and ourselves. Stories about who we are, where we came from, and what matters, about what we stand for and what we will not. Stories, ultimately, about Truth. When the story stops being told, the people will disappear, and vice versa. And when the story is turned in on itself, or when the tellers lose faith in it, when it is mocked or abused from within, or when it simply burns itself out – the people begin to dissolve: to come apart, to slough away from the centre, to stumble and eventually to fall.

While some of Kingsnorth’s arguments have unique twists – especially the AI-as-demon bit – the bedrock of what he’s saying, that modern life has a philosophy and momentum that’s often directly at odds with nature (wild and human), isn’t new. It’s the same observation that spiritually-minded nature writers have been making for many, many years. He quotes Wendell Berry (“It is easy for me to imagine that the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines.”), Jacques Ellul (“It is easy to boast of victory over ancient oppression, but what if victory has been gained at the price of even greater subjection to the forces of . . . artificial necessity [and] the technical society which has come to dominate our lives?”), Phillip Sherrard (“To think and act without the constraint of any knowledge and values other than those of the modern scientific mentality is to commit oneself to a tyranny of an unprecedented maleficence.”).

I find resonance in this sort of thinking – to me the mystery and struggle of rural life seems spiritually deep while the voluntary dependency and consumerism that forms the scaffolding of urban life seems superficial. What’s novel about my experience reading and absorbing this book, though, is that I’m doing it all with a surgically-repaired broken ankle, which is to say I’m doing it in a state of almost complete dependence on others and on technologies. This certainly complicates broadsides against the modern scientific mentality; the machine motivations that compel people to go to urban colleges and become foot surgeons or line workers in factories that make crutches. It’s so much easier to buy wholeheartedly into the agrarian/small/local utopia when you’re able bodied and strong.

There’s irony, maybe hypocrisy, here. But the fact that we all depend on the machine to varying degrees shouldn’t be used to dismiss Kingsnorth’s larger points. If I have a critique of the book, it’s that his social conservatism can feel machine generated at times. He tries to rise above politics, pointing out detachedly that the culture warring on left and right is a symptom of culturally-homeless people left unmoored by the machine. But some of his broadside against the machine seem plucked straight from the culture war. It seems fair to argue, as many religious people do, that individualism, the cult of self that replaced the taboos and restrictions of traditional Christian culture, has contributed to a host of social and psychic problems. Toxic self-absorption. Broken families. But his ranting against transgenderism, which he sees as a slippery slide into transhumanism and a machine future where birth is decoupled from maternity, can seem like a culture-war-fueled fever dream. If I were his shrink I’d advise him to put his phone down and go find a Trans person to have a pint with at the bar.

I think in reality his perspective on this issue contains a sort of converts’ zeal. He became an orthodox Christian five years ago, and it feels like he’s trying on the social mores and some of them don’t quite fit yet. His theological perspectives land better when they’re applied to the past. One of the passages I highlighted in the book as interesting was the assertion that one of the key differences between modern, machine life and ancient life was that back in the day religion served as a cultural hedge against machine living. Take the kind of modern conventional farming that you see out West, where green crop circles stand out in an otherwise desert environment. The soil in these places is an inert medium in which farmers add chemical inputs and poisonous insecticides and water; the food the medium produces allows humans to live in estrangement from nature in mega-cities where you can walk all day and never touch the earth. Most of us accept this unquestionably. Kingsnorth, citing philosopher Jerry Naydler, points out that in ancient Egypt they also had what was then modern technology. The difference was that in some cases their religious traditions deemphasized it. One ancient technology was the shaduf – a crude water-raising device that scooped water out of the Nile so it could be used for irrigation – but Kingsnorth suggests they used it warily. He writes, quoting Nadyler: “In the cultural milieu of Egypt, wide-awake to the realities of the spirit world, even simple technologies had moral and cosmic implications. This was because they required treating matter as if it were no longer the dwelling place of spirit, but as if it were simply mass with little more to it than extension, density, and weight . . . In this context, employing a machine, even a simple one to extract water from the river rather than walking into the water with a bucket, must have felt in some way sacrilegious to the Egyptian sensibilities.”

I can’t vouch for the historical accuracy here, but I can certainly feel the point on a visceral level; I’m sure you can, too. Modern machine thinking is intensely rational and logical. Taken to an extreme, there’s no point in walking to the top of a mountain to take in a view if there’s a road to the top you can drive. There’s no point in growing a tomato in your garden when you can buy one at the store for a quarter of the price and none of the labor. There’s no rational way that a shadow-creating candle or oil lamp could possibly be a preferred light source to an LED light with the power to illuminate every corner and crevice in a room. And yet most of us, Vermont Almanac readers anyway, grasp that on some deeper spiritual level, the slow, old ways nourish us in ways that the modern machine ways do not. Maybe you see this through a religious lens, but you don’t need to be religious or mystic to appreciate it.

I’m not going to be climbing any mountains anytime soon. I can’t even get out to the barn to get our seedling supplies with which to start growing a tomato, and when I eventually do, it’ll be thanks to an internal combustion engine in a UTV that will be the first vehicle I’m able to drive. My 50-year-old eyes are failing and I can no longer read in low light, and even then I need glasses, in all their plastic-framed technological glory. It’s tempting to look at my plight with a rational mind and see it as a sort of capitulation to the machine. This is, after all, what the machine offers us as compensation for giving up part of our simple, earth-centered life. Titanium screws that hold our bones together; the opportunity for employment that doesn’t strain our bodies; efficiencies. Modern technology might be rotting our souls, which is the point of Kingsnorth’s book, but it also allows us to literally fly. There’s a tension in all this that’s as old as the Icarus legend. And of course there’s no solution, there’s only mitigation. Certainly the best strategy to navigate these machine times is to strive for balance and a healthy relationship between modernity and tradition. Titanium screws in an ankle and a plan to be able to climb the mountain on foot again by summer. It’s the best and really the only thing we can do.

– Dave Mance III

Many contributors joined devoted readers to raise a glass last night (Jan. 3) in celebration of Vol. VI. The event was held at the beautiful North Branch Nature Center facility in Montpelier. In addition to readings of poetry (Margaret Draft) and prose (Brett Ann Stanciu) from the new volume, we heard from Heidi Bronner and Susan Bull Riley, the artists featured inside and on the cover of the book, about their approach to art. During the evening, we also drew the raffle winner of the framed Vol. VI cover art: congratulations Stephen Devoto, and thanks to all who entered the raffle and joined us!

Across from our farmhouse stands a silo, old and weathered. A broken elevator tube on the silo’s side looks like a missile rocket ready to launch. Old dried-up burdock push from the base of the silo and the snow reflects a soft pastel red from the westerly sunset. Long ago, the silo was part of a vibrant Hathaway farm and barn that includes our farmhouse. Now the silo stands alone, and with a bit of a tilt that questions its strength and longevity. Pigeons find home in the silo and seemingly prosper quite well, as does a patient sly Cooper hawk who periodically picks them off, feasting happily. There are dangers in the world.

Our sheep occasionally find their way out of the barn into the yard, digging at scruffs of grass they unearth beneath the snow. Four evergreen trees eaten down to nothing, looking like skeletons adorning the paddock. Sheep love their Christmas trees. We put the flock out to pasture once last month. Down the road and into the meadow. They were quite happy for the winter adventure. We’ve never done this in winter, but sheep are quite good at doing things, if they do them together. There is bravery in numbers.

The lake ice is quite solid this winter. Ice fishermen have been braving the freezing cold and wind. Unlike the sheep, they tend to be more solo and isolated. They look like winding windmills when they hook a fish and quickly pull in the hand line they are working. Ice fishing is like scratching some sort of lottery ticket. I don’t know how often they win, but enough, I guess. Yet there seems to be a loneliness around them as well, with the cold and the blowing snow. Hard to know where they are in their journey.

The ice was solid enough for a few iceboats in the bay. They are like small jets. The boats reminded me of when I was young and lived near Mallets Bay in Colchester. Thick black ice made for perfect iceboating. Boats then were big and fast and noisy, and the ride was freezing. It was thrilling and scary. I remembered my dad, who skippered our rides. He loved sailing, iceboating, and flying airplanes. I got to do all three with him. He was a dad filled with love for me and for my brother and sister. He was a nurturer and the love from his hugs still rests solidly with me. When he died suddenly from suicide, the world around our young family collapsed and our normal became a journey much scarier than anything we had known. My mother fended for herself emotionally, and we three children vaulted quickly into early adulthood. It seemed at the time that there was no hope for anything – sadness and an emptiness filled our hearts. Like that weathered silo, I felt alone and couldn’t find peace. What had been, would no longer be the same.

Over time, maybe through nature, maybe through faith, maybe with luck, my life got better. My stumbles became lessons; each filled with growth. My children taught me unconditional love, and I was able to take the love of my father and embrace it as being a father as well. People around me nurtured me, and I realized I wasn’t alone.

Tonight, it’s 7 degrees out. Despair can sit around a lonely silo. Inside the barn, our sheep are gathered, protecting each other. No wolf can harm a united flock. Our sheep look up, not down. Off in the distance, the sun setting in the west shines like a gold cross, filled with promise and hope. There is always light in the shadows. Together, we will find peace.

—Brad Ferland

— Dave Mance III

Mike F. spoke with me in 2019, when he was living in a housing community for people who had experienced homelessness. I worked as a writing partner there, hanging out with residents, composing poems for their birthdays, and collaborating with them to create a community self-portrait in their own words. Mike was a loner, but our paths had crossed somehow in the past and he trusted me with his story. He slowed down as I said, “Make me feel as if I’m right beside you.” I typed, and later, we edited the text together.

— Verandah Porche

I was one of them hyper kids, pretty “out there.”

I always loved the outdoors, hiking and walking in the woods.

I could take a one-hour walk in two, playing with sticks and rocks.

My dad was a locksmith. I remember being a little kid

and holding a lock in my hand. It took a small amount of pressure

in my index finger, so I could feel the clicks in the dial.

That’s the internal mechanism falling into place. It’s just a matter of

feeling out the lock, and before you know it, pop, it’s open.

*

I was homeless for about two years, living in my car.

I never had a cold night. The struggle was going hungry.

I don’t mind being alone. I would find an isolated spot to camp.

I didn’t care for being in town so I went hungry.

I’m the type of person who’s more grateful for what I have

than ungrateful for what I don’t. I know worry about something

will never change its outcome.

I would set up my camp in my Jeep. I had a handful of spots.

I’d wing it. Some spots were more secluded than others,

I liked camping up at Somerset. The hiking trails and the wildlife

drew me in. There are spots on the road set up for camping

near the reservoir but you don’t have to pay.

All kinds of people would come in and camp, and day hikers.

The peace and tranquility of being in the woods:

no hustle and bustle. You could just live.

It was best for me to separate myself from people.

That place provided everything I needed to get my head together.

In the winter I had to keep it more local.

The access to rural areas is so limited.

I tried to stay off the beaten path.

A snowy day would mean more time in my Jeep

instead of the out of doors. I had money for gas

but that’s about all. I had snowshoes.

One of the prettiest things I’ve ever seen

was the snow on the trees after a storm—

the way it bowed them down like a tunnel.

And looking at the night sky in winter,

you can get lost in the stars.

— Mike F.

We were very sorry to hear of the recent passing of John Adler (you can link to his obituary here). Those in the Vermont forest products industry knew John as a highly respected logger; many landowners throughout the state knew him as an expert instructor in The Game of Logging, a chainsaw and tree felling safety course. He happened to have been my instructor when I took the class some 20 years ago.

Ten years ago, I had the opportunity to spend the day in the woods with John for an article that ran in Northern Woodlands magazine. Riding beside him in his feller-buncher as he completed a winter timber harvest near his hometown of Chester, we talked about everything from logging equipment to life. As I hope came through in that article (which you can read here), John very a very thoughtful guy.

—Patrick White

I maneuvered down the four rut-filled miles of muddy gravel road north of Wolcott Village, famous – or better, infamous – for the cluster of dark brown, drab buildings. I was on my way to help my friend Nancy with her maple sugaring operation. Each time I journeyed to see her, I passed a hill farm nestled above a large swamp complex. The place seemed frozen in time.

I asked Nancy who lived there. I wanted to know the farmers’ story: how they had made their living, what their lives were like. Nancy said that it was the Colgrove Farm, known as Frank and Eva’s place. Frank had passed away in 2001 at the age of 93, but Eva, then in her late eighties, was still living there on her own.

After a few years of helping Nancy, I noticed that the hill farm had begun to look uninhabited. I asked Nancy where Eva Colgrove was. She said that Eva’s daughters had decided to move her to assisted living in Craftsbury. The daughters were concerned because Eva continued to run the woodstove after a chimney fire. Eva wanted to stay at the farm, but her daughters decided the move was in Eva’s best interest, both for her safety and their convenience. Although tinged with sorrow for Eva, this felt like an intervention from the Universe. My dream farm was now for sale.

*

I was lucky enough to purchase the place, and felt an instantaneous and deep connection to the land. The homestead was nestled in its own little valley, Judevine Mountain and The Ledges to the east looking down on a small farmhouse that was surrounded by a large tamarack and speckled alder wetland. Balsam firs encircled the swamp, with red maples directly behind. Deeper within grew a mix of northern hardwood, spruce, and hemlock trees. The scene conveyed a bucolic and boreal feel at the same time. It was quite the juxtaposition – rugged ledge-exposed mountains, wild-looking swamp land, and an island of fertile farmland with prime agricultural soils. In Vermont, it’s rare to see these habitat combinations in the same location. Best of all, no neighbors were within sight. It was quiet, other than all the sounds of nature in spring.

The landscape, I learned, was called Bear Swamp, or known by its fictional name, Judevine. The late David Budbill and his wife Lois lived in the next house up the road. Budbill, a well-respected author and poet, described Bear Swamp “as great and remote, wild and lonely” and declared the Colgrove Farm, located in the southwest corner of the Northeast Kingdom, as “one of the most beautiful places on earth.” I couldn’t agree more. This landscape inspired many of David’s plays, poems, and works of fiction as he wrote from his home office, looking out the window. The Budbills would later become good friends and neighbors.

The farm and surrounding lands provided ideal feeding and cover habitat for waterfowl, deer, moose, mink, bear, beaver, songbirds, coyotes, fox, fisher cats, weasels, woodchucks, skunk, and racoons. Many of these species would later provide unique challenges for our small farmstead. A half dozen 100-year-old apple trees shaded the back yard, and at the end of the row of apple trees stood the hallelujah crown of a quaking aspen and two larger-than-life balsam firs that stood guard in the front horseshoe drive.

*

Frank and Eva Colgrove stopped milking cows in the late 1980s but kept raising beef cows and maintaining a giant vegetable garden out back. Eva was known by all the neighbors for her home cooking, baking, and canning of all sorts of vegetables and meats. There was never a short visit when guests stopped by at Eva’s. She insisted that her visitors stay for a meal, or at least for a piece of her legendary homemade pie. After Frank died, she often convinced guests to take on some sort of minor home repair project. Visitors were more than willing to help Eva so she could continue to stay in the house.

When cleaning out and renovating the house, I unearthed a half dozen dusty photo albums buried in an old kitchen cabinet underneath boxes and ancient, poorly maintained farm equipment in the garage. Once a week, I took one photo album to the nursing home where Eva was then living. Within the sticky pages of the weathered albums were photos of tilling soils with a one-bottom plow hitched to a draft horse, sugaring with buckets hung on trees, bountiful garden harvests, and boisterous card playing at the kitchen table with neighbors. She pointed out the characters in each photo, as best as she could remember. For the most part, Eva was mentally astute, with occasional lapses in memory. Her recall was better in remembering her childhood and early days at the farm. I peppered her with questions about how she farmed, her enormous vegetable garden, canning, how many cows she milked, and how they ran their maple sugaring operation, hauling buckets to the evaporator by horse.

We would often laugh at her farm stories, Frank’s sense of humor, and her love of farm living. She had lived at the farm for most of her life. I would share my house construction stories with her, and she perked up in excitement, thinking about all the renovations to her former home, many that she and Frank dreamed about but couldn’t afford. After I purchased my first greenhouse, I brought her tomatoes and salt. The nursing home limited her salt intake; I was smuggling in contraband.

*

Katie moved in with me about a year after I purchased Eva’s place, and she often came with me to visit Eva. Katie and I were big hits with Eva and her elderly neighbors. Soon, Eva would insist that I give her a big kiss on the lips when I was leaving and told me that she loved me. This was not what stoic New England small dairy farmers were known for.

*

A year or so after I purchased the farm, and with my first phase of renovations complete, I asked the nursing home staff and Eva’s daughter in Florida if it was okay to take Eva on a little field trip. They both replied with enthusiastic yeses. I picked Eva up at the nursing home and drove her to the farm. When we arrived, I helped Eva up the three stairs on the front porch. Eva’s tiny galley kitchen was now more than double in size and had a vaulted ceiling with granite kitchen counters and hickory cabinets, a store display unit that I had purchased for half price. After touring around the first floor of the house, she remarked about the beautiful, freshly finished maple flooring that had been unearthed from under ugly linoleum. I had installed larger windows facing south that illuminated the entire house. Her eyes popped wide open with admiration of “her” completely refurbished home.

Next, I assisted Eva into my Ford F-150 four-wheel-drive farm truck. We were off for a cruise around her old farmstead. I took her to the top of the hill behind the house to get the panoramic view of the farm and the scenic valley it sits in; the same view where I fell in love with the farm on one of my first walks on the land. The place had me in an instant and Eva seemed to share my sentiment, as we sat in the pickup looking out. Eva looked down at the back garden, tilled and full of vegetables, just as she had always done. She glanced across the road to see the new greenhouse that I had constructed there, now home to tomatoes in summer and winter greens in the colder months. I was putting up cedar post fencing in preparation for the arrival of beef cows, another nod to Eva that I planned to continue farming the land. Eva said “wow” several of times as she beamed at the thought that the recently abandoned farm was again being cared for and would continue on with its new owners.

Lingering in the kitchen, Eva inhaled all the newness and then, as we slowly headed out the front door onto the porch, her eyes swept around the farm, mountains, and pastural fields, as if taking it in for one last time, which, unfortunately, she was. The smile slowly left her face when she knew I would have to bring her back as nighttime began to fall, casting its shadow on Judevine Mountain. I helped Eva get into my car, and, as we pulled down the driveway, she looked over her shoulder with a sense of pride at the farm that she and Frank lived on and loved for so many decades, and that was now left in my hands. She gently touched my arm and said, “thank you,” as we took the gravel road back to the nursing home.

*

Eva died at age 95. I am so grateful I had those few years to become good friends with her. When I found out about the funeral arrangements, I knew that I had to do something at my home – our home – for her. I reached out to her daughters and suggested that Eva’s family and friends come to the house after the wake. We would be having pie, Eva’s favorite, with family and friends. They were all grateful to be back at the renovated old farmhouse to celebrate Eva.

*

Katie and I still live on the old Colgrove Farm, which we renamed Bear Swamp Farm. We grow vegetables in our unheated greenhouses and in the same garden out back where Eva tended her vegetables. We have a hundred or so blueberry bushes, and I also planted raspberry bushes, along with pear, plum, and nut trees. We still harvest currants from Eva’s bushes. A small herd of beef cows graze our hillside pastures, and our chickens and geese roam where they want. We sell some of these foods to the local food co-ops and give some to our neighbors, but mostly, it’s for ourselves. Across the swamp, I cut, split, and stack our firewood from the same woodlot that Frank worked. Katie cans pickles, dilly beans, fruit jams, tomato sauce, and salsa, just as Eva did.

Katie and I host big gatherings and bonfires on the farm, including our neighborhood-wide event called Swamp Fest, attracting a hundred or so of our closest friends and neighbors to celebrate our connection and commitment to this place with a large community potluck, bonfire, and music. We are grateful and honored to be stewards of this land that passed to us from Eva, my new old friend.

—Jim Ryan

“My New Old Friend” is a version of an essay from Jim Ryan’s forthcoming book, Whistling Up in Ghostland, a collection of personal essays due out in winter of 2025-2026 (keep up to date on his website). Jim recently retired after 30 years of watershed protection and restoration work with the Vermont Department of Environmental Conservation, the USDA, and in the private sector. He now spends his time writing prose and song lyrics, volunteering for local environmental organizations, recreating in local streams, lakes, and mountains, practicing Reiki, and growing vegetables and cutting firewood with his person, Katie, on Bear Swamp Farm in the southwest corner of the Northeast Kingdom.

Like other urban immigrants to the northern forest, I arrived in Vermont intent on taming the landscape with agriculture: tilling a vegetable garden, planting fruit trees, keeping bees, and fencing out the wildlife I called varmints. As far as I was concerned, the forest was primarily a scenic backdrop, a place I visited on blazed trails, where white paint on trees seemed a small improvement over the breadcrumbs in Grimm’s famous fairytale.

I’d relocated from Manhattan, where streets and avenues are laid out along the cardinal points of the compass and signs mark every intersection. In New York City, I could find any alpha-numeric address without even looking at a map. In addition to my Big Apple street savvy, I also brought my degree in English literature to Vermont. I’d specialized the 19th-century British fiction and was confident I could read and comprehend any printed text. But I didn’t know how to read the forested landscape.

For 30 years I lived in fear of losing my way in the woods, unaware that the forest had its own alphabet. All I recognized in the woods were the signs of human habitation: stone walls, cellar holes, and barbed wire swallowed by trees. Mostly, I walked with my gaze on the worn path under my boots, lifting my eyes only to seek the next blaze or in anxious anticipation of arriving at a sign reassuring me I was on the right path or indicating how far it was to my destination: a summit, a shelter, or back to my car.

I knew landscape literacy was possible. My New Hampshire-bred husband was an advanced reader who bushwhacked fearlessly. For 30 years, I followed him into the woods, where he would try to educate me, pointing out slopes and rises and features of topography. I marveled at his arm-waving confidence. He read the landscape to me with the same glee he’d read the Harry Potter books to the kids. But I failed to comprehend the forested landscape the same way I’d failed eighth-grade algebra. I could follow Tim as long as I could see him, but when he was out of sight, I suffered anxiety similar to that which overtook me on math exams: thrumming ears, sweating palms, and stinging eyes. I was only confident heading into the woods by myself when my snowshoe tracks on the white page of winter would lead me home.

I’m a reader, so I turned to field guides in my early attempts at forest literacy, but the details of tree identification didn’t stick to my brain the way stories do. I needed a narrative to organize the signs and symbols of the forest in my mind. Learning how to read the Vermont landscape became a personal imperative, but I wasn’t sure how to go about it until one day, I looked over the garden fence into the woods and heard a voice from the universe, Learn from the deer.

I was 60 when I started to hunt. I’ve now entered the woods before dawn and found my way out after dusk. Thanks to the deer, I’ve stopped looking for handwritten signs and have started to see the language of the forest, where trees live in communities similar to how library books are shelved according to type. I pass through the beech and birch as I climb to the ridge to where the deer dine in the oak and find safety in the hemlock. I’ve even found trees so unique they’d be in a special collections room if they were books, and I’ve given them titles: The Windowpane Oak has two trunks at ground level that reconnect about thirty feet up; the Queen Victoria is an ancient maple, as wide-waisted as that august monarch; and the Stone Oak, has grown over a perfect cube of granite, making an excellent seat.

I’ve now spent days sitting in the woods with my back against a tree, as engrossed in watching the drama of the forest as I’ve been lost in good novel. I’ve seen deer fleeing, deer mating, a buck leaving a scrape hoping a doe will swipe right. And I’ve seen the Bruce spanworm, tiny white moths that fly in clusters, like small patches of fog at ground level, and known informally as “Hunters’ Moth.”

As with any good book, I can get lost in the forest. But now—even when I don’t know exactly where I am—I’m confident I can read my way out.

—Deborah Lee Luskin

Deborah Lee Luskin is the author of Reviving Artemis: The Making of a Huntress, a memoir about learning to hunt at 60. The book is available wherever books are sold. You can also keep up with Deborah’s writing on her website and Substack.

A friend shot a 70-pound bear the other day, and in relaying the story, because that’s what hunters do this time of year . . . Anybody getting anything up on the mountain?” “So and so shot a 6 on opening day of bow; so and so got a bear.” “How big?” “Little. 70 pounds.” . . . That’s how it goes. But as I was saying, in relaying the story, there’s often been a judgmental reaction. “Geeze. My dog weighs 70 pounds.” That sort of thing.

My knee jerk response in these sorts of exchanges is to point out that field-judging a bear can be hard. Anyone can tell if a bear is really big – you’d know a 500-pound bruin that was walking through the woods. And anyone can tell that a 30-pound cub is really small. But there’s a big ambiguous middle ground, especially with female bears, who are round balls of fat this time of year. They look like they should be heavier than they are, but they’re squat and short, so even a mature female might weigh only 100 pounds. And in the field, the bears don’t stand still and let you put them on a scale. You have a second or two to make a life and death decision and then you’ve got to live with the weight of that. That’s part of what makes hunting the rich experience that it is.

There’s a philosophical point around size to make here, too, in that if you’re legally hunting for food, which on the hunting ethics scale is highest and best practice, why does it matter how big the bear is anyway? You’re after the meat. I’m not going to extol the virtues of hunting and procuring wild food and then criticize someone for legally shooting an animal that’s on the small side. I butchered three hogs last weekend and no one was interested in how long they were or how much they weighed. And yet with hunting, there’s this inclination to want to know and then to judge. Part of this stems from the fact that many of us hunters need to measure ourselves against something, which has a light side when wielded honestly, but can have a darker, more ego-driven side too.

I went out bear hunting myself the other day – it was one of those days that just felt fated. There’s this sixth sense you get as a hunter where you suspect you’ll get an opportunity; some ripple in the cosmos you can feel. And sure enough, around 10 a.m. this hard-to-judge bear walked by (see video above). I was there to get meat, and yet my first impression of the bear was that she was small, which gave me pause. She was rounder than long, so I suspected she was a female. Was she a yearling? A small, mature female with a cub behind her? Something felt off to me, so without even really thinking about it, I whipped out my phone and shot her with a camera instead of the gun. When she saw me we were less than 10 yards from each other, and she put her head down as if I might disappear if she averted her eyes. Then she did a slow, sneaky turn and crept away for a few steps, hoping maybe I hadn’t noticed her, before disappearing forever.

If you’re not a hunter you might imagine that hunting is a pretty black and white affair – animal walks by, you shoot it. But for a lot of hunters, there’s a decision that has to made first, and it’s often not clear-cut. Do you shoot the 4-pointer on opening day of deer season, knowing that it’s the only buck you can harvest? Do you shoot a small animal? Do you consider family dynamics and leave a fawn or a cub motherless going into winter? Years ago I wrote a newspaper column about a bowhunter who was struggling trying to decide whether to shoot a doe who was with a fawn. The whole column focused on the arguments for and against that were running through the fictitious hunter’s head. And it generated some pointed letters to the editor from the meat-hunting community. One guy wrote “why the hell even go if you’re not going to shoot?” I tweaked that quote to make it nicer than it actually was, but regardless, there’s a fair question here. Why tell your family that you’re going out to try to get bear meat, wake up at 4 a.m., walk several miles up a mountain with a gun, and then sit there with your phone in your hand when the time comes to deliver?

There’s a philosophical answer here, too, in that restraint is more often than not a good default position with anything in life. And I could extol the sound, ethical hunting motivations beyond meat. But the most honest answer I could probably give the what-the-hell-are-you-doing-out-there guy if he’s reading this column is that there was no grandiose, stake-in-the-ground logic or personal philosophy in this moment. I was just being human.

Bear with me as I make an abstract point that circles back to hunting, but my eight-year-old daughter is into Pat Benatar (I’m over the moon about this considering her peer group’s infatuation with the K-Pop Demon Hunters soundtrack), and if you listen to Pat’s music, you hear 80’s girl-power anthems delivered in a snarl followed by songs about her heart in pieces on the ground. We were listening to an album while we were doing the dishes the other night, and I made some snide comment about the dissonance between these lyrics, to which my partner said something to the effect of: certainly a woman can be tough and also be vulnerable. I quickly backpedaled and said, yes, of course that’s true because, yes, of course it’s true – I made sure my daughter heard me say it. There’s a hunting parallel here: certainly a hunter can pursue game for meat and also decide not to pull the trigger. This world we live in wants to put us in little ideological boxes. We’re supposed to be meat hunters, or trophy hunters, or what box do you want to put me in? What culture war do you want to use my experience to fight? But that’s so disrespectful to the human experience. Hunters are complicated and sometimes contradictory – they’re people. There’s no script out there, which is a big part of what draws us to the pursuit in the first place.

– Dave Mance III

Pre-order Vol. VI now!

The sixth annual volume of Vermont Almanac is nearly complete and will be heading to the printer very soon.

We’re especially excited by some tweaks we’ve made to keep things fresh. Volume VI has a slimmer, more elegant format, along with a lower price that we hope will allow more people to join this community. Instead of monthly chapters, we’ve organized this year’s book by seasons. And our many talented contributors were encouraged to be creatively restless.

All that said, Vol. VI will be instantly recognizable to longtime readers, with the same focus on telling stories of rural Vermont. Inside you’ll find an exploration of a Revolutionary War-era archaeological project, learn about a quirky Vermont newspaper, and view a photo essay that will help you marvel at the ordinary. You’ll step back into the days of one-room schoolhouses and get guidance on how to buy an older tractor. There are philosophical musings on the value of wild places and the art of weeding. You’ll read about a thriving fiber mill and how robots are helping dairy farmers milk (and care for) cows. There’s lovely art and moving personal essays, not to mention poetry, history, nature, recipes and more. Want to know how to make a broom, build a stone wall, or age a deer? We’ve got that, too, and plenty more to deepen your connection with the land.

This newest Almanac will be printed and shipped by early December.

Pre-ordering your copy now ensures you’ll receive your copy as soon as possible, and helps us cover our not-insignificant printing costs.

Thank you for your continued support of Vermont Almanac!

The Vermont Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets is looking for input on the type and extent of drought-related impacts that agricultural producers are experiencing around the state.

If you are a business, organization, or individual that raises animals and/or grows feed or other crops (produce, maple, Christmas trees, horticultural plants) for anyone beyond your immediate family, you’re asked to fill out the 2025 Drought Impact Survey.

Survey data will be used to inform drought response efforts, allocate resources, and advocate for future planning, relief, and recovery programs. The goal is to understand the impacts of the drought on the Vermont agricultural community, so that relief and recovery efforts are better informed and can meet your needs.

The survey should only take 10-15 minutes to complete. The deadline to complete it is December 15. You can email AGR.Drought@vermont.gov or call 802-828-2430 if you have questions or need a paper copy or assistance filling out the survey.

I glance at the mound of plants at the edge of the garden, the yield of several hours of wrestling with the ditch lilies and irises that had taken over. Especially the lilies, with their long, sinewy roots, and tubers that can pop up a new plant in no time. I muscle them out of the ground and offer them to friends and neighbors via Front Porch Forum. How satisfying to be so magnanimous: these are vigorous plants, generous with their blooms. Any other year I’d be enjoying the array of purple and orange, cutting the flowers for the table. But this isn’t any other year, for I’ve fallen in love with native plants.

For more than a decade I’ve written about restoring landscapes – ways to ally with nature’s healing processes. I’ve reported on ecosystems revived, even transformed, enough to know that even extensively damaged terrain can return to ecological function. I’ve often highlighted restorative grazing. For example, I’ve told the story of how strategically managed cattle provide a safe haven for endangered migratory grassland birds in Mexico, and, across the globe, brought rural villages in Zimbabwe out of poverty. Yet the question nagged me: what can I do besides document what’s possible? I’m not about to reinvent myself as a rancher (though I did spend a week at The New Cowgirl Camp and we hosted four sheep for a summer). I don’t see myself digging swales to slow down water or traveling to remote areas to plant trees. Ultimately, I’ve decided to take my own advice, what I tell people who ask me how they can contribute to earth healing: Start where you are.

Where I am is on ten-ish acres on the west slope of Mt. Anthony in the southwest corner of the state. Like much of Vermont this land was once a sheep farm, since reverted to second or third-growth forest. There are some meadow-y areas that look natural and rather pretty, although once you’ve noticed multi-flora rose, Morrow’s honeysuckle, Asiatic bittersweet, and the like, you can’t unsee them. Where I have some agency is with biodiversity: I could help create the conditions for more plant, insect and bird life to thrive. My focus could be pollinators, the base of the food chain and pivotal to healthy ecosystems.

We know that pollinators are struggling. The plight of monarch butterflies and native bees has been in the news for years. In Vermont the use of herbicides known to harm bees has steadily increased on farms, lawns, parks, utility and transportation maintenance. Another threat is the insecticide class called neonicotinoids, which causes significant collateral damage. According to the American Bird Conservancy, a single pesticide-coated seed can kill a songbird. Habitat loss and fragmentation are other stressors. Plus, exotic, or introduced, landscape plants offer insects neither the nutrition nor refuge provided by the native varieties with which they co-evolved.

At first my regard for native plants was somewhat dutiful. I printed out a list of plants in their official Latin designations and went to my go-to place for vegetable starts. I found 4- and 6-inch pots that matched the inscrutable names on the paper. But was this a native plant or a hybrid bred for flower size or color? I knew this mattered, since ornamental cultivars may not offer sufficient food for insects, and can even confuse pollinators. I put the half-dozen plants I was certain about in my cart and called it a day.

But then I started looking. In late summer, when much of the goldenrod had grown taller than me, I thought, wait a second: some goldenrod plants have jagged leaves while some have leaves that are smoother and narrower. Down the hill I saw plants with sweeping yellow buds atop skinny foliage—those must be goldenrod too. In the shade I noticed small goldenrods with flowers arranged in a graceful arc. I’d always figured goldenrod was simply goldenrod, so ubiquitous and so sturdy that I never gave it a thought. I cued up my plant ID phone app and moseyed around the property. The varieties I’d seen were, respectively, Wrinkle-leaf Goldenrod (Solidago Rugosa), Giant Goldenrod (Solidago Giantea), Grass-leafed Goldenrod (Euthamia Graminifolia) and Blue-stemmed Goldenrod (Solidago Caesia). In all, within a short walk of the house I found eleven different types of goldenrod, including Early, Gray, Canada, Giant and Elm-leaved.

Asters, too: we have fabulously purple New England asters (Symphyotrichum novae-angliae), Heath Aster (Symphyotrichum ericoides), White Panicled Aster (Symphyotrichum lanceolatum), Calico Aster (Symphyotrichum lateriflorum), and, visible from the front steps, a broad expanse of White Wood Aster (Eurybia divaricate). I tested myself on identifying them all, and found a few more types here and there. Clearly, our native plants were more varied—and more interesting—than I’d imagined.

I’ve long loved spring ephemerals, woodland flowers like bloodroot and trillium that take advantage of direct sunlight before the trees leaf out. Bloodroot (Sanguinaria) shows up first: delicate white-petaled flowers swaddled by pale green leaves, as if in a hug. Come late April I was scanning the premises for bloodroot, like on a safari.

As the land woke up this May, something strange happened. I started seeing plants native to this area that I’d never seen before: Goatsbeard, Frosty Hawthorne, Waxflower Shinleaf, Golden Alexander, Agrimony, and the evocatively-named Eastern Enchanted Nightshade. At the edge of my vision I’d pick up an unfamiliar silhouette. It was as if I were drawing on a different sense, a kind of knowing that was somehow connected to my growing intimacy with the land. I’d check the app for the plant names, but the experience was less about documenting than about recognition, affirming something I already knew. I wondered: were these plants always here—or did they show up because I was paying attention?

I found a fine source for native plants, Wing and a Prayer Nursery in Cummington, Massachusetts. Started a decade ago out of concern for local bees, it has become a hub for people who like—and like to talk about—native plants. I make regular pilgrimages there, hanging out with the blooms, bees and butterflies and reminding myself to buy only as much as I can plant in a timely way. I choose a few large plants but mostly the far cheaper plugs, battling my own impatience to have fully established garden.

Where to put them? Over the years iris and lilies, which far pre-date my tenure here, have commanded much real estate in the large garden to the south of the house. These cultivated plants offer little ecological benefit, so in order to create favorable conditions for native pollinators—bees, birds, moths, butterflies—to thrive, I need to provide food and habitat that supports them. And so a typical summer afternoon would find me, with dirt on my jeans and hori-hori garden tool in hand, hauling out iris and lilies. It is hard not to be humbled by how robust these plants are, how primed to dig into the soil, to grow and spread. I don’t take lightly that I’m removing them from their home. I can only thank the plants for keeping us company all these years. And welcome their native counterparts back home.

– Judith D. Schwartz

Judith D. Schwartz is an environmental journalist and author based in Bennington. Learn more at www.judithdschwartz.com.

On Oct. 2, Ellen Kahler, executive director of the Vermont Sustainable Jobs Fund (VSJF), will receive the Terry Ehrich Award for Lifetime Achievement, presented by Vermont Businesses for Social Responsibility (VBSR).

Kahler has led the VSJF for the past 20 years, launching initiatives such as Vermont Farm to Plate, DeltaClimeVT, the Vermont Forest Products Program, while providing business management coaching to entrepreneurs in the agriculture, forest products, and renewable energy fields. We asked her a little more about how VSJF helps these businesses, and what she hears from them about their challenges and opportunities.

How do businesses find the Vermont Sustainable Jobs Fund, and why do they search out the business coaching expertise that you offer?

I think a lot of it is sort of word of mouth; periodically we put it out there that we have openings to work with businesses. We focus on working with about 15 to 20 businesses in a given year, because we work very intensively with them. If a business is in the earlier stages in their development, and they’re just looking for someone to sort of double-check things for them, they can get that support free from the Small Business Development Center, for instance. And there are lots of other entities out there that provide various resources. What differentiates our business coaching program is that we do very intensive work with a business over a 12- to 18-month period – we’re looking at financials, we’re looking at marketing and sales strategy, we’re looking at their HR systems and their operating systems, and we’re really trying to help that business get to the next level, however they define that.

All companies go through change over time, and whenever there’s change that’s happening, you’re going through some kind of transition – it could be a leadership transition; it could be that you’re entering a new market; it could be that you really are ramping up and need to hire a lot of new employees, or you’ve had to let some people go to get the organization sort of right-sized, so that you can then start hiring again down the road once you rebuild your sales. During these transition periods, it’s really beneficial as a business owner to have unbiased eyes on your business and somebody that you can talk to…so having a business coach can be really valuable.

The industries you focus on – agriculture and forestry – are the same ones that we try to shine a light on in Vermont Almanac. How was the decision made to specialize in these areas?

Vermont Businesses for Social Responsibility helped the legislature create the Sustainable Jobs Fund in 1995, and so in that governing statute we have to stay within the sectors of ag and food, forest products, renewable energy, green technology, waste management. So those are our sectors. Basically, they’re working land sectors. We do a lot of work in the food manufacturing space. We have worked with some farms, but we tend to work with farms if they’re larger and they do value-added processing and where they do their own distribution. [For smaller farms selling direct to their customers, Kahler cites the Farm and Forest Viability program through the Vermont Housing & Conservation Board as one good resource.] For example, we worked with Monument Farms for three years; they’re a medium-sized dairy operation that produces their own milk, they process that milk, they bottle that milk, they distribute that milk, they do everything. We’re working with companies like Global Village Foods in Quechee, we’re working with Myers Produce in Craftsbury. We just finished working with New Frameworks, which is out of the Burlington area – they build amazing small housing units using straw panels. And right now we’re working with five of the six food hubs in the state because of some special infrastructure funding that they’re getting from the Agency of Agriculture.

Because you’re helping working lands-oriented businesses to grow and thrive, the “Sustainable” part of your organization’s name seems like it could be taken a few different ways.

“Sustainable” often most used in terms of financially sustainable, but that’s only one aspect. The true definition of sustainable is a business that’s economically successful, socially just, environmentally sound – all three. There are folks who think, well, unless you’re financially sustainable, you can’t really think about the economy, the environment, or about your workers. But that’s not our belief. Being sustainable is about all three parts, now and for future generations. So there is that future orientation to it.

Two topics you hear a lot about in media reports today are the challenges businesses have in finding workers and concerns about tariffs. What are the owners of working lands businesses in Vermont telling you about these two subjects?

Workforce definitely is always an issue. In the Vermont labor market there are more jobs open than there are workers to fill them, which is a shift from where we were 10 years ago – previously it was always the case that there were more workers than there were jobs. And so now we’re trying to grow the workforce and workforce participation, because we work with companies whose growth is being constrained by not having enough workers. In terms of tariffs, there’s been some damage, but the tariffs have actually created a bit more of an opportunity for agriculture- and farm-related types of working lands businesses, because the tariffs are creating supply chain challenges in terms of importing food, which gives Vermont farm food businesses the opportunity to replace imported food on some level. The forest products industry is a totally different story because they are more connected to a global marketplace and so, for instance, we have a number of sawmills that were selling whole veneer logs to China and shipping them over in containers. That has completely shut off; there is none of that now. On the other hand, our mills and our loggers are always competing with Canada, and it’s still a little unclear how that will sort itself out.

What other concerns are you hearing from the businesses you work with and talk to?

It varies. But I would say there are concerns from the renewable energy business in the state because of all of the extra rebates and incentives that are going to be going away. Those businesses are all scrambling because the affordability of some of their products was being supported through the rebate programs; if those rebates go away there may be fewer homeowners willing to make the jump into renewables. The biggest issue now is the uncertainty of everything. Things are changing every day. Things are changing by week, and it’s really hard. Businesses want stability. They want predictability. And this environment…is anything but that. And so that uncertainty makes it hard to plan for growth. It makes it hard to plan for investment, and it even makes it a little bit hard to think about bringing on additional people if you could find them, because you don’t know what’s going to happen with the economy.

Are there any new initiatives at VSJF you’re especially excited about?

The one that is newest that we’re in the middle of now is a forest business accelerator. Through the business accelerator we fund a very intensive, four-month-long program with startup companies, and in this case, it’s companies in the forest economy. They’re very innovative businesses, meaning that they’re creating new products using wood as a base. So it’s not producing lumber, but things like, for example, making graphite out of wood. It is figuring out how to use drone technology to monitor and measure forest health. In some cases, it’s actually using wood as a basis for creating some new product that is a totally new use of that wood. The reason that we’re doing that is because we have a major wood supply and northern forest across Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine – this is a major forested region, and the traditional use of wood in our region, up until maybe 20 years ago, was pulp and paper. Those mills were largely in Maine and Vermont loggers and log truck drivers, and even the mills, were basically sending Vermont trees over to be used in the pulp and paper industry. Well, as the paper industry has contracted, most of those mills in Maine have closed. So with this forest business accelerator, the intention is to create some new products and new markets for Vermont wood to go into.

The Vermont Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) released the above map on September 12, showing large swaths of Vermont have reached “severe drought” stage. State officials are asking Vermonters to report drought impacts including.

• wells or water supplies running out or tasting different

• damage to crops and other farm losses

• low water levels in lakes, rivers, or recreational areas

• any health issues related to water quality or availability.

Reports on low or dry wells can be made to the DEC at the link: https://experience.arcgis.com/.../1d3753b053.../page/Welcome

DEC officials also say Vermonters should also consider voluntary water conservation efforts at home.

We’re fortunate in Vermont that our forests typically regenerate naturally, as opposed to other parts of the country with drier climates and less fertile soils, where trees need to be replanted after harvests or other disturbances.

But even here there are certain instances where more active participation is required to get trees established and growing. One of those is when floodplains are being restored. Flooding in this state in recent years has highlighted what was already known: floodplains are critical to reducing the risk of flooding in cities and towns, and they also play a key role in ensuring water quality, providing wildlife habitat, and storing carbon to mitigate climate change.

A number of groups around the state are involved in the work of restoring riparian areas that have spent decades in agricultural use or that were developed or dammed or overtaken by invasives or otherwise compromised. Regardless of the circumstance, the key component in restoring the floodplain ecology is to replant native riparian trees and shrubs.

That was the impetus behind the creation several years ago of the Riparian Lands Native Seed Partnership (RLNSP), a collaboration between The Intervale Center in Burlington, the NorthWoods Stewardship Center in Charleston, Vermont Fish & Wildlife, and the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service. The effort is also supported by a number of other conservation-related entities around the state.

Brooke Fleischman was hired at the beginning of 2023 as The Intervale Center’s conservation nursery seed coordinator, and in her role she coordinates the RLNSP. Fleischman says that while the program has become more formalized in the last couple of years, it’s really building on more than a decade of work on this topic: “It initially started after the tropical storms and hurricanes back in 2011 and 2012, when some people and conversation groups started to notice that after all of these disturbances, there was a lot of natural regeneration happening on old farm fields. And so they basically wanted to see if that could be replicated on sites that hadn’t just been flooded but had just been, say, taken out of corn production.”

And so began efforts to spur regeneration in those types of areas. “At first they were mostly depending on natural seed fall for those projects. They would prep a field using a plow or herbicide to kind of recreate the bare soil that you would get from a corn field, but they quickly realized that timing is a big part of the work, and you don’t always have natural seed sources nearby. So that’s when they realized the need to collect seeds.” In 2022, NorthWoods Stewardship Center put together a full crew dedicated to seed collection. And since Fleischman came on board the RLNSP the following year, she’s been coordinating seed collection efforts by a number of different partners in different parts of Vermont. These include conservation groups, state agencies, universities, and private businesses, like Redstart Forestry (you’ll read about their tree nursery in Vol. VI of Vermont Almanac when it comes out later this year).

“My position is getting more folks in all areas of the state involved in seed collection,” she says. “That way there will be more genetically diverse plants available for restoration in Vermont. In the past, just capacity-wise, at least for our nursery in Burlington, we would just get seed from whatever was closest, and then those plants would be going out everywhere, from southern Vermont to the Northeast Kingdom. But even within Vermont, there’s a pretty good variability of ecosystems and elevation and all of those types of variables. So now we’re really trying to get more seeds available that are locally collected, and tracking more information about the seeds when they’re collected.”

The collective efforts have been impressive. In 2024, the RLNSP collected nearly 39 million seeds from native trees and shrubs, representing 39 different species. (The accompanying table shows the woody species collected.)

How do you collect tree seeds?

“It all starts in late March and April, when we go out into the field to check out leads that we’ve gotten from groups or private landowners (seeds are only collected with landowner permission). And we have a license with the state to collect on any state-owned lands. We kind of scout out what might be available at each site,” says Fleischman.

If you happened upon the group at that time of year, you might mistake them for birders. “It’s a lot of wandering around with binoculars, and just staring up at the trees to see if we can see any flowers or anything developing, especially in the spring, because there are a lot of species that disperse in the spring, that have separate male and female individuals. Obviously we’re looking for the female individual, since they’ll be the ones that produce the seed.”

The spring scouting work allows the RLNSP to track the timing of flowering and get a head start on pinpointing where collection efforts are likely to be most successful. “We like to find areas along trails or along roadsides or on the edge of a field; a lot of times, in those cases, there’s a whole line of a particular species that we can just kind of hop down and continue to collect from,” she notes, adding that a site is considered “good” if there is an abundance of a specific species, “or if there’s a lot of diversity in that area of species we’re interested in, because we only collect a maximum of 20 percent of what’s available at a given site to allow for natural regeneration or any wildlife foraging that would happen – that’s kind of the standard for seed collectors.”

Seed collection usually starts in the beginning of May, at least for the species the RLNSP is after, and that work generally includes using orchard ladders and pole pruners and buckets. “And a lot of totes and tarps!” emphasizes Fleischman. One thing that adds to the challenge of collecting tree and shrub seeds is that there is so much variability between species; picture the difference between, say, tamarack and nannyberry. “In most cases, we’re clipping small branches off of trees if we’re up in a ladder, or for shrub shrubby species like willows and dogwoods.”

Cleaning and separating

Collecting the seeds is just the beginning of the work; there’s much more work to be done once the seed is back at The Intervale Center. “A lot of time in the spring, it’s a lot of species like cottonwood and willow and aspen that all have these really fluffy seeds. So we begin by laying those out to allow them to open up a little bit more; we have them sandwiched between some screens that contain the fluff, because it would just go everywhere.”

Once everything is drier and more open, the group uses what they’ve dubbed “the tornado” to separate out the seed. “We learned that technique from someone who works at the USDA germplasm center in Ames, Iowa, and we’ve found that it’s a cost-effective cleaning method,” says Fleischman. “We have an air compressor and a shop vac, and we vacuum up the fluff out of the screens and kind of blow it into a cylindrical container – I use a pretzel container – that you put a hole in the bottom of and turn upside down on a set of screens with a bucket under it. Then you just blast some compressed air through that hole, and it kind of creates this tornado effect in the container. And with that agitation, the seeds that are trapped in that fluff get disturbed enough that they break free and fall through the screens that are below them.”

For other species, they use a Dybvig seed cleaner, which works well with “fruity” species like dog woods and choke cherry and viburnum, says Fleischman: “It’s kind of like a big blender, but a little bit more complex in that it has a plate on the bottom that you can resize a little bit. And we set that so it’s just enough that the seed doesn’t fall through the crack of the plate. And once you get it started, it blends everything up. You add in a little bit of water at a time, and all of the pulp and skin and everything else get falls through that crack…and you’re just left with seeds inside the column. That works really well for larger collections, because you can fit a five-gallon bucket of seeds in there, and we do end up with that amount sometimes.”

Where do the seeds go?

In some cases, the seeds are earmarked for direct seeding out on restoration projects. Fleischman says they view direct seeding “as sort of an additional approach to bare root plantings,” like those grown in Intervale’s conservation nursery. The specifics of each site are different, so different approaches might be needed. Plus, she notes, not every project or landowner has the funding necessary to purchase bare root plantings. “So direct seeding…is another way to get the native riparian species established.” For example, the RLNSP is currently working with Vermont Fish & Wildlife on direct seeding trials on old agricultural fields.

In other cases, the seeds are planted at The Intervale Center’s conservation nursery, to be grown out as bare-root seedlings that will be planted on projects. Remaining seeds are also made available, at no cost, to other conservation nurseries in Vermont.

The RLNSP tracks the location where each batch of seed was collected so whether that seed is planted directly or grown into a bare root seedling, the group that plants it will know the source of the plant material. “For a lot of groups, that is of interest,” says Fleischman.

Why is it so important to go through all of this work to ensure that native species are used in restoration work? “It’s been shown that native plants just do better in their environment; that when they’re replanted they can be more resilient to stressors and have better relationships with pollinators and everything in that environment,” she explains.

Fleischman says collecting and distributing seeds for restoration projects is rewarding. “Everyone in the restoration community has so much knowledge. And it really does seem like seeds kind of are their own niche – people know a lot about trees and a lot about planting trees, but not there’s not as much of an understanding of how to collect seeds and how to process seeds and how to propagate seeds. So it is kind of a little realm of the restoration world, which is pretty fun to be a part of.”

— Patrick White

To learn more about the Riparian Lands Native Seed Partnership or to get involved with their seed collecting efforts, email Brooke Fleischman, statewide seed coordinator (Intervale Center), at brooke@intervale.org.

Blueberries, which originated in North America, are one of the healthiest fruits you can eat. They have a unique and delicious flavor, are low in calories and are packed with antioxidants. They hold up well in the freezer or fridge, so you can enjoy them long after harvest. This year, the blueberry crop is plentiful on Vermont farms.

For centuries, Native Americans ate wild, or low-bush, blueberries. These grow naturally on acid soils, producing fruit that is rather small on plants that only grow about a foot tall. The domesticated, or highbush blueberry, produces much bigger berries and more of them on a plant that grows many times taller than its wild cousin.

The domestication of the blueberry started in 1908 when a researcher at the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), Dr. Frederick Coville, began seeking out superior wild plants for breeding in New Hampshire. In 1911, he lucked out when Elizabeth White, a commercial cranberry grower in New Jersey, learned of his work and perceived its potential. She offered her assistance and for the next two decades enlisted her pickers to search for exceptionally fine bushes in the wilds of the pine barrens.

Dr. Coville developed the first 15 commercial blueberry varieties of blueberries. In 1937, a Vermonter took over the USDA blueberry breeding program. Dr. George Darrow initiated cooperation with state agricultural experiment stations and private growers so new varieties could be tested in different growing areas.

Between 1946 and 1962, he provided over 200,000 seedling plants to cooperators in 13 states. Two of these cooperators were Green Mountain Orchards and Harlow’s Sugarhouse, both of which had apple orchards in Putney.

Over time, the highbush blueberry crop really took off. The 2022 U.S. Census of Agriculture counted 286 farms with 404 acres of blueberries in Vermont. The typical yield is almost 2,000 pounds per acre, so about 800,000 pounds of Vermont blueberries must be picked, sold and eaten in a relatively short time. Almost all these berries are sold directly to customers or to local stores and distributors.

Nationally, 795 million pounds of blueberries were harvested in 2024. About half the crop comes from Washington and Oregon, which have a combined 32,000 acres in production, mostly on specialized farms that ship to stores and processors.

Blueberries are unusual in that they require an acidic soil to grow well. In many locations, sulfur should be added to lower the soil pH before the crop is planted. Then, the plants must be mulched, pruned and irrigated to produce the highest yields.

Fruit buds form on the second year of cane growth, so removal of old canes is important to allow room for new canes, which maintain production over time. And it can be quite some time! Blueberry bushes, if well-tended, live for many decades.

Eating blueberries can provide a slew of health benefits. They are a good source of vitamins C and K as well as dietary fiber. In addition, blueberries, like other blue and red-colored fruits and vegetables, are high in antioxidants.

One of the antioxidants in blueberries is anthocyanin, a type of flavonoid responsible for the blue pigment. Antioxidants protect your body from free radicals, which are unstable molecules that can damage cells and contribute to diseases. Research also suggests that blueberries are beneficial to maintaining memory and cognitive function.

To find a farm where you can pick your own fresh, delicious local blueberries, visit vermontpickyourown.org

— Dr. Vern Grubinger

If you’re looking for some hopeful signs for the future, consider reading about the seven Vermont high school students recently honored by the Vermont Land Trust. The organization explains that, “Since 2005, the Vermont Land Trust has recognized outstanding high-school juniors and seniors who are dedicated to agriculture and forestry. Instructors from Vermont’s farming, forestry, and natural resources programs can nominate students for the award each spring.” This year, each of the seven students were honored with $500 checks. The seven students receiving awards were:

• Brailey Livingston, New Haven

• Jacob Swartz-Reiner, Colchester

• Kierstin Moulton, Troy (pictured above)

• Max Wagner, Enosburg

• Paul Tipper, Jeffersonville

• Raymond Powers, Sheffield

• Randy Laird, West Hartford

You can read more about the work each has done and their plans for the future here.

The New York Times published a story last week about Dr. Navindra Seeram, a biomedical researcher who’s been blurring the line between promoter and researcher where it comes to maple syrup. It’s probably safe to assume that every syrup producer in Vermont has benefited from his “research,” which has helped to brand maple as a healthy sweetener full of antioxidants and vitamins that may even cure cancer.

It’s a good exposé, and hopefully the point comes through that this is part of a systemic problem with the way federal government funding is allocated as much as it’s a story about one man who had no qualms about playing fast and loose with the facts. Presumably the $2.6 million in government funding that supported his work was funneled through the USDA’s ACER Access and Development Program. According to the USDA’s website: “The Acer Access and Development Program is a competitive grant program that promotes the domestic maple syrup industry through activities associated with research....” It’s hard to read that line and imagine an outcome other than the one that Seeram delivered. If you want good, objective science, you’re not going to get it by tying it to a competitive grant process that’s soliciting research that’s promotional.

As fate would have it, Mark Isselhardt, a scientist who works for UVM Extension and writes the annual maple season recap in Vermont Almanac, was one of the authors of a paper that appeared in Science Direct last month that reviews some of the science around maple and health. You can check it out here.