Entries by Dave Mance III
Turning a Patch of Lawn into a Vegetable Garden, Part 2
Year two of the garden project started with a decision: was I going to keep using a tractor to work the earth? Like many of you, I grew up thinking that you needed to deeply till the soil to grow things in it. As a boy, I remember being beat up by the family roto-tiller, […]
Turning a Patch of Lawn into a Vegetable Garden, Part 1
Like many people, I decided to start a big vegetable garden in the Covid spring of 2020. The goal was a garden on the cheap – a couple hundred bucks was the rough budget agreement with my partner. I went the traditional rectangle-on-the-ground route, as opposed to raised beds, because I didn’t want to have […]
April, Part 3
The “drip, drip, drip” of sap landing in a bucket isn’t a sound that’s heard much in Vermont anymore. Most commercial sugarmakers rely exclusively on tubing to silently transport sap downhill to a tank or the sugarhouse. But even if buckets were still the go-to collection method, sugarbushes in the state would have been quieter […]
April, Part 2
After a year of Covid disorientation came an April of disorder. Hot, dry, then snow on the daffodils. But remember – April is often like that. An unusually large number of mourning cloak butterflies this year, it seemed to me. Also, other members of the Nymphalidae family that overwinter as adults, such as the delicate […]