Outdoors & Environment

This snapping turtle stopped all the traffic in Charlotte.

You don’t need a lot of land to have a garden. It doesn’t even matter if the usable space in your yard is the size of an area rug or if you live in a second-floor apartment with no yard. The options for gardening in small spaces are not small at all.

It is springtime in Vermont and our forests are beginning to fill with green.

I am standing in the Winooski River just a couple of miles upstream from the town of Jonesville off River Road. I’m not giving any secret spot away if I tell you that it’s just upstream from the railroad trestle. Everyone knows about this spot.

People eager to feed and protect the pollinators in our gardens, neighborhoods and town convened at the library on a beautiful May 21 morning for our pollinator workshop.

We moved to our Spear Street home on two acres 28 years ago. Since then, Colleen and I have established gardens, planted berries and fruit trees, erected bird houses, started compost piles, built stone walls and replaced lawn with evergreen ground covers.

Have you heard about all the non-native invasive species in Lake Champlain?

When hiking in Vermont’s woods, have you ever been wowed by a larger than average tree? Or perhaps you have a mammoth specimen growing in your own backyard?

Vermont, along with the rest of the country, will recognize National Emerald Ash Borer Awareness Week, May 22-28.

Okay, I think we’ve really had enough of the April showers thing. I’m ready for the May flowers, and turkeys, and ramps, and fiddleheads, and nettles, and dandelion greens … and turkeys.

Are trees individuals? I started to think about this question after hearing a researcher say that trees are “colonial organisms” — more like colonies of autonomous branches than individuals. As I struggled to find answers, I found that this topic is as nuanced and as complex as our forests.

The Quinlan Covered Bridge butterfly garden gets some clean up.

As we delight in energy from the warming sun, so too do ephemeral wildflowers, taking advantage of sunlight before trees in the canopy leaf out.