Category: Environment
-
When nights are cold and daytime temperatures rise above freezing, sap starts to run, and buckets hang from maple trees all over rural New England. Visitors, eager for some diversion between ski season and summer, flock to sugarhouses to watch the evaporation process, buy maple products, and eat at sugarhouse restaurants. Colonists first learned about…
-
Gould's, the iconic sugarshack restaurant on Route 2 in Shelburne, has closed. Gould's has served tourists and locals alike since 1960 and will be sorely missed. Davenport Maple Farm Sugar Restaurant But off Route 2…
-
Be kind to these guys (above) because they turn into these guys… Swallowtail larvae love parsley and, if you grow parsley, will eat it to the ground. Solution: plant a special parsley bed away from the one you use for your kitchen and gently place any swallowtail larvae you find in the wrong patch…
-
Outside the store at Pine Hill Orchards No country experience satisfies like picking apples in the fall, especially when it’s followed by pies, soufflés, pancakes and every other sort of apple delight. In Charlemont we’re favored with four orchards in three nearby towns, Shelburne, Colrain, and Ashfield, and they all offer “Pick-Your-Own," from mid-September through late…
-
I came around the corner of the house and stopped. A young bear, shiny and slender, a perfect ingénue, was crossing the road. She hung in the middle for a moment as she turned back for one, two, three (!) reluctant cubs, who came tumbling out of the underbrush and followed her across the road…
-
Late Autumn is the name of a film by Ozu, who often named his films after seasons: Late Spring, Early Spring, Early Summer (despite being best known for Tokyo Story). Western culture doesn’t usually draw such fine distinctions between the seasons, but country life has sharpened my sensitivity to the differences between the early,…
-
A year that started out so hopefully for us in Charlemont, a new windmill and an old store turned 150, turned out to contain multiple weather disasters for Western Massachusetts with Hurricane Irene causing the most distress in the hilltowns. Avery's store c. 1880 The Mill Brook off…
-
The beautiful Mill Brook Downgraded to a tropical storm, Hurricane Irene made its way relatively languidly through the northern Appalachians, dumping record amounts of rain and causing massive flooding. Little Charlemont, which, in the past, had escaped floods, ice storms, and tornadoes, took a direct hit. The beautiful Mill Brook, for which our…
-
Charlemont is indeed a Janus-head looking backwards and forwards. This year Avery’s general store turns 150. The Averys have owned the store since it was built in 1861, which makes it the oldest general store in America to have been owned by the same family. Avery's store…
-
As a 60-something, I am appalled and mystified whenever I read some community has discouraged or banned hanging laundry outdoors. For the land of the free, this seems a petty and ridiculous, not to mention environmentally disadvantageous, limit on personal freedom. I was well into grade school before my mother had the…
Site Title 