by David Brynn This week I had the opportunity to fell and girdle large trees in a family forest in New Haven. The managed area is part of a 12-acre mesic maple-ash-hickory-oak forest community dominated by sugar maple, black and white birch, hardhack, and scattered old field white pines. This treatment was part of a cost-share practice funded through the …
On a cold and drizzly November day, there’s nothing quite like splitting firewood to warm a body. And if you’re splitting firewood for a local wood bank, from trees carefully harvested from a healthy forest on land that’s owned in a way that promotes social equity? Well, that’s an unbeatable way to warm body, heart, and soul. On November 1, …
Step into the Middle Barn at Vermont Family Forests’ Anderson Wells Farm, and you’ll see why it’s the perfect site for so many of VFF’s gatherings. We’ve held concerts, workshops, and landowner gatherings in its spacious, rustically beautiful interior. On warm summer days, we roll open the north door, revealing a riot of color from the garden nearby and the …
Healthy forests and the clean water that flows from them are at the heart of Vermont Family Forests’ mission. And who doesn’t want clean water and healthy forests? But forest health isn’t a warm and fuzzy concept. Recently we discovered first hand how, in terms of capturing heart and mind and encouraging exceptional forest care, there’s nothing quite like a …
Afternoon sunlight washed the Anderson Wells Farm homestead and gilded already-brilliant forest foliage as VFF staff and forest landowners assembled for the second annual VFF landowner gathering on October 14. We hold our autumn gathering to celebrate the landowners we’re fortunate enough to work with, to share the bounty of the season’s harvest, and to talk together about what we’ve …
Vermont Family Forests has hosted “Game of Logging” chainsaw training courses for more than 15 years, taught by the top-notch instructors of Northeast Woodland Training. Each 8-hour session is packed with information and hands-on practice of chainsaw skills. We realized recently that a missing piece in those training sessions was an introduction that places that training within the larger context …
In early September, VFF staff ventured into our neighboring White Mountains of New Hampshire to take part in a two-day workshop in Northern Hardwood Silviculture held at the 5,500-acre US Forest Service Bartlett Experimental Forest. Bartlett is part of one of our country’s great legacies—a network of national forests that encompasses about 190 million acres across the country. It’s a …
Joyful curiosity. That’s the spirit Mike Kessler embodies as he explores the art of wildlife tracking. Last Friday, 16 of us had the good fortune to dip into Mike’s enthusiasm, experience, insights, and holistic approach in VFF’s latest workshop, Re-storying the Earth Through Wildlife Tracking. As an animal moves through the forest, he or she leaves traces of those movements, …
Join us at the Walkover Gallery in Bristol for an evening with author, activist, scholar, and commoner David Bollier. Director of the Reinventing the Commons Program at the Schumacher Center for a New Economics, co-founder of the Commons Strategies Group, and author of Think Like a Commoner and several other books,David Bollier will discuss commoning through the lens of his newly released book, Free, …
This course is now fully enrolled. Visit the Eventbrite registration page (see below) if you’d like to be placed on the waiting list. Date: Friday, September 21, 2018 Time: 8:30-noon Location: VFF’s Anderson Wells Farm, 2542 Quaker St. Lincoln VT 05443 Cost: $25/person. Includes a post-workshop lunch of flatbread pizzas (with toppings from the Wells Farm garden) cooked in our earth …
