Joe Phelan, owner of Gulf Pond Trees in Perkinsville, Vermont (802-263-5458), offers these hints for keeping a fresh-cut evergreen healthy: 1. Take a thin slice off the trunk, place the tree outside in a bucket of water, and protect it from the wind. Leave the net on. 2. When you’re ready to put the tree […]
Make a Christmas tree farm visit a new family ritual! Just add a saw, snow, and a hillside filled with balsam, Fraser fir, and Scotch pine.
With a past both sad and even sordid, Dogtown has drawn painters, writers, lovers of history, and seekers of solitude. What is its secret?
There is a strain of contemporary art that has to do with investigations of the artistic imagination as applied to social history and natural history. Perhaps the best known example of the former is Matthew Barney, who creates his own hallucinatory world out of bits and pieces of social fabric. The best known of the […]
All this talk about the stock market and its fickle fortunes reminded me of this column I wrote ten years ago, when the stock market did its last dip and roll. What is it about October? Here’s my column from October, 1998: My mother was born in the month of October, a fiery month. According […]
One of the things I notice often when I go for a run is litter. I’ve bored many friends with my concept for a Dunkin Donuts anti-littering education campaign inspired by the countless discarded coffee cups on the side of roads. When I was little, I considered litterbugs to be very bad people. Now, I […]
The news on the television is pretty grim these days. I’ve decided not to watch. I have moved my laptop from my desk to the kitchen table where I can watch the colors change while I work. In most places, yesterday was a gray and drizzly day, but here, we are a bit above the […]
Green to Orange and Red: The green we see in tree leaves is the pigment chlorophyll. Stored in chloroplasts in the watery cytoplasm of plant cells, it is responsible for creating food for the plants. Chlorophyll uses the sun’s energy to split water molecules and recombine them with carbon dioxide in the air to make […]
Slide show: Mystic River Scale Model. Inside a modest white building on the northwestern edge of the green at Mystic Seaport in Mystic, Connecticut, you’ll find an homage to the human need to tinker, to our quest for unachievable perfection. In the early fall of 2005 on my first visit to the museum, I looked […]
By Lucille Rines Senior Production Artist, Yankee Publishing A nice destination we always go to in the fall is Windy Hill Orchard in Greenville, New Hampshire. The farm offers tractor hayrides to take you out to the trees, where you can pick your own apples (you can also buy bags of apples already picked), plus […]
By Francie Von Mertens Peterborough Berry picking lures me out, adding a sense of productivity to my wanderings. Wild berries: June’s strawberries and July’s raspberries are small but flavor-packed. August and September’s blueberries and blackberries are abundant enough to bring home in quantity. Wild cranberry relish is a Thanksgiving tradition. Berries from the freezer show […]
I felt true sadness this morning when I saw a notice in the local paper about the death of Dwight Miller, Jr., a veritable icon in the northern world of fruits and vegetables. When I lived closer to Miller’s orchard in Dummerston, Vermont, I used to go there to pick apples in the fall or […]
